It's not that the meals were a foretaste of the paradisiacal afterworld, but during these meals the blur and frightening motion of the week was banished.
The term afterlife refers to the continuation of existence of the soul, spirit or mind of a human (or animal) after physical death, typically in a spiritual or ghostlike afterworld.
Although they generally keep to themselves, they threw a party in the summer, and convened a seance in a darkened room for the purpose of reaching out to the afterworld.
