at the funeral home

"It's not like I have a choice," she says, staring off into the future. She's done what she had to do, and she'll keep doing it. For her father, for her sister. For her mother, lying still in the next room. She looks younger than nineteen. She looks like the kid she'll never be again, except no kid should be that weary. No mother should pass from life at the age of not-quite-forty-two. It's not that others don't have it worse, not that it won't be as right as it can be in the end. It's not that anyone said life would be fair; we just wish it would be, anyway.

The rented chapel is crowded but silent, the custom not quite familiar to the two blondes in the back. We are all just being there for them, quite literally. At the moment, it's all that we can do.