I wasn’t ready to say goodbye—not really. People said the end would be peaceful, and maybe it was for Lily. For me, it was a cliff. The week before her funeral blurred into antiseptic corridors, beeping monitors, whispered prayers, and the small, stubborn hope that refused to die even as my little girl did. Today we put her in the ground. I moved through the service like a ghost. Faces came and went—neighbors, cousins, kind people with casserole voices—offering the same tender words that slid off me like rain. I nodded, thanked, hugged when hugged, and kept my eyes on the empty space where my daughter should have been.
The drive home was silent. No radio, no talk. Grief makes you superstitious; you start to believe that quiet can hold the world still, the way a hand can still a trembling glass. I pulled into the driveway and sat for a moment gripping the steering wheel, gathering the courage to walk into a house that suddenly felt too large for one person’s heart.
Not the kind you toss in a trunk for a weekend. This was big and bright—carnival stripes, little flags hiccuping in the breeze. For a second I thought I was imagining it, the mind slipping from sorrow into something unstable. But it didn’t dissolve when I blinked. It stood there, cheerful and impossible in my grief-drained yard.
I got out of the car on legs that didn’t trust me. Who would do this, and why today of all days? The closer I walked, the more real it became: the stitched seams in the fabric, the stakes driven into the cold ground, the flap tied loosely like a mouth waiting to speak. There was no note, no explanation, just color against my grayness. I reached for the flap. My hand trembled. I didn’t want any more surprises. I lifted it anyway.