What a strange tradition, the way we say goodbye, kneeling over a casket, tiptoeing around small talk and muted circles, somber and bowed by decorum, how one’s own mortality emerges naked and emboldened in the forest of faces, stalking through the room. It seems too late, detached from the real experience of loss, how it lingers, the sharp pangs that follow: a familiar scent, a song on the radio, a memory plucked out of thin air while washing dishes.
