In Scott Huler’s interesting and fun book, No-Man’s Lands: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey, Huler organizes his experiences around those of Odysseus, beginning with looking for Calypso’s cave, which he did near the end of his travels but which begins Odysseus retelling of his adventure. It’s a good book and should probably be on the list for many book clubs.

At one point in The Odyssey, Odysseus goes to Hell. Huler explained that he understood going to Hell was a one way trip, so he opted for another destination. Here’s an excerpt from chapter 11 of No-Man’s Lands, regarding his rumination among the dead. His location: the Capuchin cemetery within the Church of the Immaculate Conception (Chiesa di Santa Maria della Concezione).

Off the long hall are five crypts, each filled with artwork made of human bones—delicate traceries of pelvises and vertebrae; nicely proportioned thighbone archways beneath rows of human skulls; ceiling rosettes made of scapulae, collarbones, phalanges. In many crypts, bones—the bones of an estimated four thousand of more Capuchin monks—create niches in which stand, or recline, complete monk skeletons, clothed in those hooded coffee-brown robes.

Decorative art covers the walls and ceilings like the plaster filigree in a Renaissance palace—only it’s all made from bones, all with a focus on the brevity of earthly life. It’s breathtaking. . . . there are several full skeletons of children, empty eyes seeming to implore you not to kid yourself: Nobody is spared the fate we all share.

I believe I closed my mouth after twenty minutes. … I had never before seen such a loving acceptance, even a celebration, of the inescapable end of life. . . . [Two skeletons in robes held signs] “Said one, in English, “As you are now, we once were”; said the other, “As we are now, you soon will be.”

When he left the crypts, he lingered over the postcards, wondering how he could return the world and how he could express gratitude for the experience. The “shortish, thin” monk with a white beard smiled and gestured that he had spent a long time down there, an hour and half. Most people stayed for about fifteen minutes. Huler tried to say it gave him a lot to think about. He and the monk tried to communication through a small crack in their language barrier, but they couldn’t say much. So when he offered to pay for three postcards, the monk slipped him a fourth one as a gift.

A close-up—from the Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo’s representation of God reaching out to Adam, their fingers all but touching. The moment when God gave life to mankind. Looking into my eyes, the monk took the card back, held it against his heart, and then offered it again to me, both palms upward. . . . In this place of death, of skeletons and warning and dust, of reminders that death is necessary and all around us, he gave me the most beautiful picture we know of the creation of life. I didn’t cry, but I held that card to my chest, I said, “Grazie, grazie, oh molto grazie,” and we shook one another’s hands time and time again, and then I walked out into the gray skies, the traffic, the honking horns, and the chattering tourists of the Via Veneto.

Death in life, life in death; the dead speaking to me in plain voices, giving me straightforward advice to help me live the remainder of my life, help me be the man I wish to be. What’s more, only after I embraced the dead, accepted the underground crypt for all its macabre beauty and truth, did life—in the form of a postcard from the hand of a monk who didn’t speak my language—wake me up and remind me, in a moment that lacked only a crashing D-sharp chord from a church organ, that it’s especially when surrounded by the dead that you can finally, truly appreciate the gift of life. It’s one of the most unforgettable moments of my life.