I have gone over that moment a hundred times, the moment I stood up, and what strikes me most about it now is how much easier it would have been to stay seated.

Everything in the situation was built to keep me in that chair.

The solemnity of the room, the hundreds of eyes, the certainty that standing would make me look exactly like what Damon needed me to look like — the broken, hysterical, grief-crazed mother, disrupting her own daughter’s funeral, to be pitied and removed.

A lifetime of training in how a woman is supposed to behave was pressing down on my shoulders, and all of it said sit down, keep quiet, don’t make a scene, let the professionals handle it, don’t embarrass yourself and your family in front of all these people.

That pressure is a real force.