She would have heard my refusal as coldness, as a wife overriding a mother, as me choosing paperwork over her son’s body.

I would have heard her request as a grieving woman trying to undo my husband’s dying choice.

We would have said things, in the raw days after his death, that could not be unsaid.

And Cecelia would have grown up with a grandmother and a mother who did not speak, who divided her holidays, who each carried a private grievance about the way the other had behaved when Mark died.

That is the likeliest version of the story, the one that happens to countless families, where a death that should have drawn people together instead drives a permanent wedge, because grief came out sideways and there was no one wise enough to catch it.

Mark caught it.