I don't remember the rooms, only the coffin with its coronet of white roses, the carpet, a hard-back chair, and the feeling of being squeezed like a sponge - too wrung out to cry

摘要

There was no consolation in the design of the funeral home. Would this have made any difference? I remember its surreal ordinariness, like a hotel lobby. Its mediocrity sat at odds with the drama of that bad day. A mother and father, broken - my mum, my dad - and the body laid out - my sister's body, just 36 years old, stolen by illness. But also a body that was not hers - no longer hers - the viewing of it proof that she was gone. Gone where? The church was better - Victorian, hefty yet soaring, shafts of light, an echoing organ. It felt safer to cry in there, with its pillars like the trees of a great stone forest. An important space worthy of my sister, and reliably solid at a moment when I felt soluble, half-dissolved.