Everything from this point forward is a bonus

I feel there's a trope in American literature and culture about the walking dead inhabiting a living afterlife. Think of a person or character who has had a near-death experience: been saved from suicide, or a walked away from a plane crash, or outlived a too short prognosis for certain death by cancer, who afterwards thinks of life as a bonus period, unexpected, blessed and unworldly. In my work as an engineering and science educator I teach kids to follow their curiosity and imagination and immense abilities to build and discover. The materials used in this are often cast-off toys and tools of other, better funded projects, or reused styrofoam trays, or decade-old computers, or the durable packaging and scraps from a construction site. These are things destined for the landfill and the recycling center, and I am able to pluck them out of their journey for a short living afterlife in a child's hands and mind's eye. Being already dead and not quite knowing it, such material doesn't mind if we cut through half a dozen pieces before getting the right shape. It is perfect stuff to hot glue together into little sculptures, whittle to become a shim or strut, be crushed under a pile of books carefully stacked up to see how much force it can take before cracking. And it call be swept into the dumpster without more than a twinge of guilt on the part of this particular recycling citizen.