What Happened to the Bennetts

by Lisa Scottoline

It was a family room without the family.

Deep inside me was the most profound sorrow I had ever known, one that had unpacked, settled in, and taken up residence. I felt the mute agony of loss, my heart so heavy it weighed on my lungs, making it hard to breathe.

The only way out of this hell was through,

In my experience, things that go without saying sometimes need to be said.

Death was everywhere, in the present, in the past, in the future. I wondered why we bothered with time at all.

Worlds separated us, but they came together at the death of one of their own, heartbroken, devastated, and reeling.

I was stripping down to something essential, revealing my rawest self. I was shedding whatever I used to be. I was becoming someone else. Maybe who I should have been, all along.

Maybe there would come a time when it didn’t make me feel broken, but I doubted it.

it struck me that we would always do that for each other, lift each other up and hold each other close. That’s what a family was for, even when the worst thing possible happens.