And also with you

After you die, Mag told me, you're reduced to a cold mess of body parts. You stop being a person. You're just a cluster of cells. Inanimate, your body is something separate from what it was when you were alive. You're an empty shell, and just like that, the shell has nothing to do with the creature it once contained. And that was the real kicker, she said, that even if she put all his pieces back together, her dad wasn't in there anymore. Gluing together a shattered jar won't bring back the bit of life that once lived there.
His body was on the floor, still dressed in his Easter clothes. His hand was limp, but his finger was still looped around the trigger. There was a lot of blood, bits of brain and bone, Mag said. The same things that make up my head, or yours, or anyone's. The same things that were working in me so I could process the scene, so I could scream and scream and cry and call out, "DADDYDADDYDADDY, I LOVE YOU, DADDY NO, PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE,"—my parts that made me scream for God to help me, my parts that are the only reason that I can conceive of a God, were firing faster than I can understand, while his were spilling out onto the rug, soaking into the floorboards. A mess of parts, disassembled and broken. And they'd been in tact just minutes before, keeping him in there. He'd been in there, and these parts, his shell, his jar, had been able to pour my cereal, to drive me to Church, to sing the hymns with me, to put both hands together and pray, to say "Amen," to take his neighbor's hand, to say "Peace be with you."