Nobody tells you that grief has a guest list. Jennifer died on a Tuesday. Pancreatic cancer.
Six weeks from diagnosis to burial, which is the cruelest kind of fast. Not enough time to say everything you need to say. Too much time to watch someone you love become a version of herself you barely recognize.
She was fifty-three. She still had a Pinterest board called When We Finally Go to Italy. We never went to Italy.
I’m telling you this so you understand what kind of hole I was left standing next to. Not a hole in my schedule. Not a gap in my social calendar.
A hole in the center of everything. Jennifer and I had been married twenty-six years. She laughed at my terrible jokes.
She left her socks on the bathroom floor and somehow that never annoyed me once. She made coffee too strong and said “you’re welcome” to the microwave when it beeped. She was the whole architecture of my ordinary life.
And when she died, the building stayed standing. The walls, the roof, the furniture, the kitchen with the white cabinets and the old magnet from Niagara Falls still on the fridge. But none of it meant a single thing.
What I did not expect, what no grief counselor or sympathy card with a watercolor sunset prepared me for, was what my family would do next. Nothing. Absolutely, spectacularly, historically nothing.
Let me give you the cast. Hannah was my older sister, sixty-one years old when Jennifer passed, living forty minutes away in the same Ohio suburb she had lived in since 1994. Hannah had strong opinions about the correct way to load a dishwasher and an even stronger belief that her schedule was always more complicated than yours.
Rachel was my younger sister, fifty-five, two hours away, very busy, always just about to call. Brooke was my daughter, twenty-eight when Jennifer died, living forty-five minutes away with her husband, Morgan, and their two kids. Austin was my son, twenty-six, single, living twelve minutes from my front door.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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