No wonder then Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's sensitive, funny-serious new piece in my online Paris Review discussing the post-flesh careers we might have as ghosts feels unusually attention-seizing.

And for those of us who doubt that Heaven will suit our personalities (for example I am a shy, reclusive, agnostic aesthete and fear Heaven is a believer-teeming, gregarious, happy-clappy, vulgar place perhaps with interior decorations of the same horrible hues God uses to paint His often appallingly lurid sunsets) the free-range, footloose, solitary career of a ghost has always seemed far preferable.

Ms Buchanan asks us to imagine our possible "ghosthood" and to think of how, finding ourselves given the gift of ghosthood, we might shape our phantom career, to suit and to fit who/what we are.

"To become a ghost, you don't have to be bitten by a vampire or receive a curse or encounter a mad scientist or fall under the spell of a full moon. All you have to do is die," she observes.

"Still, I imagine the first days of ghosthood would be tricky. There are so many different hauntings, so many ways to do it. In a way, it reminds me of puberty. The unpredictable shifts. Sudden changes in weight and the way people see you."

From there, bedazzingly the young British-American writer of considerable talent (as her inspired comparison of the coming of puberty with the coming of ghosthood testifies) sets us Seven Big Questions for Your Life After Death. Once you've answered them, she thinks, "then you'll have a plan, or at least, a ghost story of your own".

Her seven questions (each addressed by her with little essays full of wisdoms of the uncanny from fiction and painting, from folklore and from Shintoism) ask us about where we will want to haunt, what kinds of spirit forms we will choose to be, whether we will wait to be invited to haunt someone/somewhere or will always want to surprise.

She also thinks it important to ask ourselves why we want to haunt and whether or not we will be "results-oriented" in imitation of Hamlet's father's bitter and tormented ghost who, utterly results-oriented, did no haunting just for fun but only for (justified) revenge for his murder, murder most foul.

"You might be here [your chosen haunt] for the traditional ghostly roles to scare, to shiver, to get revenge," Buchanan fancies.

"But you have other options ... [and] your purpose may change once you arrive. In Matsuda Aoko's short story ... Quite A Catch, a young woman fishes a skeleton out of the Tama River only to find herself meeting a grateful ghost. The ghost explains that she was murdered by a man she didn't want to marry and is here to say thank you for bringing her skeleton to light. This simple thank you develops into a romance between the living woman and the dead."

Mature-aged and mortality-minded now, with COVID rampant and with the Chinese coming to get us, I feel enormously grateful for Ms Buchanan's manual of self-help for all of us now so open to end-of-life advice, now contemplating ghosthood if it is an option offered us.

Perhaps thinking of how and where we will want to haunt when we are liberated from our bodies (these prisons!) tells us something of who and what we are now, for the moment-in-time we spend as blood and bone, as what Ms Buchanan calls a mere "skin-bag of electrical impulses".

If ghosthood by-laws and conventions allow, I would like to spend a large part of my spectral year shyly (but blissfully) among the forests of this federal capital city's National Arboretum. I love the company of trees and the Arboretum (especially its Forest 68 of pale, elegant, ghost-white-trunked Adaminaby snow gums) is a bosky paradise I already, in the strictly conventional sense, haunt.

But then, as well, always in life very political and often driven by malice and vengefulness, I think I would like to spend some part of my spectral year vengefully, spitefully haunting The Lodge so as to make life there bed-wettingly terrifying for conservative US-appeasing prime ministers.