Those were the exact words my daughter fired at me, a hollow, buzzing sound vibrating through the receiver. I had just informed her, quite calmly, that I could not cancel my sister’s funeral to supervise her children for the weekend. My own sister, dead for exactly three days, and the entire processing capacity of my daughter’s mind was consumed by her disrupted weekend itinerary.
I was standing in my kitchen, a space that usually offered sanctuary. The morning light was a soft, forgiving yellow, filtering through the lace curtains I had sewn myself. I had just poured my second cup of black coffee, anticipating the kind of quiet, solitary morning I had finally learned to cherish after five decades of perpetually rushing through life to accommodate other people’s emergencies.
Then, the landline rang. It was my daughter, Karen.
“Mom, I need you this Saturday,” she demanded.
No “Hello.” No “How are you holding up?” Just a straight, unvarnished demand for service.
I took a long, slow breath, inhaling the steam from my mug. “Karen, sweetheart, I can’t do this Saturday. Aunt Ruth’s funeral is Saturday morning.”
A heavy silence fell over the line. I could almost hear the gears grinding in her head as she calculated the inconvenience.
“Well, can’t you just attend the service and come right back?” she suggested, her tone completely devoid of empathy. “It’s not like she’ll actually know the difference, Mom.”
My knuckles turned white as I gripped the edge of the Formica counter. Ruth was my younger sister. My only sister. She was the woman who had patiently taught me how to drive a stick shift in an empty parking lot, who had physically held me up by my elbows when they lowered my husband’s casket seventeen years ago, and who had called me every single Sunday at 4:00 PM for forty-two years without a single missed week.
