He stood perfectly still while nearly two hundred people silently judged him.
Then he looked toward the front of the room, where my eighteen-year-old son lay in a polished wooden coffin.
And he began walking.
My husband, Daniel, gripped my hand so tightly that my wedding ring pressed into my skin.
“What is he doing?” he whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“Daniel, please.”
“It’s Jack’s funeral, Rachel.”
“I know where we are.”
My voice came out sharper than I intended. I had slept barely three hours in the previous two nights, and my body felt as though it belonged to someone who had been awake for a year.
Our son had died seventeen days after his eighteenth birthday.
Fourteen months earlier, he had been an ordinary teenager complaining about homework, asking for money, and leaving dirty plates beneath his bed.
Now, we were preparing to bury him.
