Everything you need to understand or teach A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle.
Beagle is more interested in exploring the difference between life and death in terms of how an individual person creates and maintains an identity than in any wider social issues.
This first novel is set in a Bronx cemetery, where the newly arrived dead quickly lose all sense of themselves as individual people by forgetting the sensations and impressions which composed their lives. The dead cannot leave the place...