As the mourners drifted away and the churchyard emptied, she found herself standing before the casket longer than anyone else, her hand resting on the wood. She didn’t pray, didn’t speak aloud. She only thought of all the questions she had carried since childhood, the questions she had offered him in his final days, the questions he had turned away from.
They would never be answered, at least not by him. The days that followed blurred into a haze of paperwork and condolences. Neighbors dropped by with casseroles, their voices pitched with awkward sympathy, while the hospice nurse reminded her to drink water and sleep.