My son passed away and left me only a plane ticket to rural France. Everyone laughed when I opened the envelope. I went anyway.
When I arrived, a driver was waiting with a sign bearing my name, and he said five words that made my heart race.
I never expected to bury my child.
It is the most unnatural posture on earth, to stand upright while they lower your boy beneath it. Richard was thirty‑eight.
I was sixty‑two. April rain threaded through the oaks at Green‑Wood Cemetery and slicked the marble angels until they looked like they were weeping with us.
Sound came thin and far away: shovel on wet soil, a zipper of thunder somewhere over the harbor, the soft human noises people make when they don’t know what to do with their hands.
I remember thinking that the world should stop.
Just for a minute. Traffic on Fourth Avenue, the F train under our feet, planes on their way to somewhere sunnier. All of it should have gone still in recognition that my boy, the boy who once tried to glue macaroni to a shoebox to make me a “jewelry safe,” was now inside a polished mahogany box disappearing into the ground.
Grief walled me off.
Faces blurred at the edges until only the casket, the raw mouth of earth, and my own name spoken in softened tones remained.
A cousin pressed a tissue into my fist. Someone from Richard’s board squeezed my elbow and murmured, “He was a visionary, Eleanor.” The words slid off like rain off the tent.
Across the grave stood my daughter‑in‑law.
Amanda—precision hair, liner that wouldn’t dare smudge, posture like a trademark. Married three years and somehow the gravitational center.
Her black Chanel looked like a dress made for sponsorship dinners, not for the edge of a grave.
She accepted condolences with a professional tilt of the head, like grief was a brand opportunity.
When our eyes met, she arranged a sympathetic smile that never touched anything living. There had been a time I had tried to love her simply because my son did, because after cancer took his father five years earlier, I had promised myself I would not be the stereotype of the jealous mother‑in‑law. But with Amanda, there was always the sense of something calculated humming behind the eyes, like a spreadsheet open in the background of every conversation.
“Mrs.
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