I like this description of the way an eternal part of us remaining even while the body shuts down. This description is from the book The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed, a beautifully evoked tale about three women of Somalia at the beginning of the civil war in 1988. And like good fiction will, it tells you more about Somalia (and much else) than any number of surveys or reports.
She presses her palms into her eyelids and replaces the torpor of her life with shooting amber stars and exploding electric galaxies. She learnt to do this as an indolent little girl, whiling away dead time by voyaging through the quiet, almost-black world behind her eyes. She has not aged much as a soul, still thinks too much, loses herself to dreams and nightmares, her body hiding — no, trapping — what is real and eternal about her, that pinprick of invisible light in skin, desperate for release into the world, as frantic as a firefly in a child’s jar.
Nadifa Mohamed, The Orchard of Lost Souls, 2013, p 163-4