“This is Jack’s funeral, Marla.”
“I know what it is.”
My husband’s face that morning was seventeen days of about nine hours of total sleep. Mine was the same. We were two people who had used up every single reserve we had, and the thing nobody tells you about grief is what it does to your patience for anything you don’t immediately understand.
Everything feels like one more insult, and you have no room left to absorb it, so you swing at it.
And then the minister said Theo’s name for the eulogy.
I Had Completely Forgotten He Was Supposed to Speak
That’s how far gone I was. We had planned that service — I had planned that service, with a woman named Rosalind at the funeral home, over three afternoons — and Theo Vance was on the program in my own handwriting, and I had forgotten.
