Just for a second. That brief, cruel moment between sleep and consciousness where your brain hasn’t caught up to reality yet. I reached for my phone thinking I should call her and know how her physical therapy was going.
Then I remembered.
The grief hit physically—sudden, devastating, stealing the air from my lungs. I curled into myself, pressing my face into the pillow, and the sound that came out of me didn’t feel human. It felt animal. Primitive. The kind of pain that existed before language.
Jack’s arms came around me before I’d even registered he was awake. He didn’t say anything. He just held me while I broke, his hand cradling the back of my head, his breathing steady against my ear like an anchor.
I don’t know how long I cried. Long enough that my throat went raw. Until the pillow was soaked, my face swollen, my body aching from the force of it.
When I finally went quiet, Jack’s hand moved to my face, his thumb tracing my cheekbone.
“You’ll be fine,” he said quietly. “It’s going to be fine,”
“She’s going under, Jack.” My voice broke in a sob, “It’s real. She died. It’s real, she’s truly gone,” My eyes burned with more tears while he pulled me into his arms, cradling me as the grief hit in harder waves.
The funeral was exactly what my grandmother would have approved of.
Small. Simple. Just the people from her church—the ones who’d known her for decades, who’d sat beside her in those wooden pews every Sunday, who’d brought casseroles when my parents died and had watched me grow up in the space between hymns.
I stood at the front of the church in a black dress I’d bought the day before because I didn’t own funeral clothes, and I looked at the casket with its single spray of white roses—her favorite, nothing excessive—and thought about how much I already missed her.
Pastor Williams spoke about faith and service and a woman who’d lived her values instead of just talking about them. He told the story about how she’d organized the church food drive for fifteen years running, how she’d never missed a bake sale, how she’d quietly paid for three different families’ groceries when times were hard and never wanted credit for it.
The church ladies sang “Amazing Grace”— off-key in places, but earnest. Real. The kind of music my grandmother had loved—nothing polished or perfect, just honest voices raised together.
Jack stood beside me. His hand found mine and held on, and I gripped back hard enough that I probably hurt him. He didn’t let go.
Claudette was in the second row with Michael. Her eyes were gentle when they met mine, and when the service ended and people started filing out, she was at my side immediately.
“Come here,” she said, and pulled me into a hug that somehow felt like the first real thing that had happened all day.
I held onto her—my best friend, my sister in everything but blood—and let myself take comfort in her warmth.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered against my hair. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“I know.”
“She loved you so much.”
“I know that too.”
We stood there holding each other while people moved around us, and when we finally pulled apart, Claudette’s eyes were red but her voice was steady.
“If you want company, I can always come over,” she said. I smiled faintly at that,
“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,”
Her eyes flicked briefly to Jack when I said that, then she squeezed my hand once before Michael guided her toward the exit.
Jack’s hand found the small of my back, warm and steady, and I leaned into him without thinking about it.
“You okay?” he asked quietly.
“No. But I will be.”
He kissed my temple. “Yeah. You will be.”
The weeks after were a blur of paperwork, phone calls, and the horrible logistics of death. Closing accounts. Canceling subscriptions. Sorting through a lifetime of accumulated things and deciding what mattered enough to keep.
