My Son Wore a Bright Red Dress Across the Graduation Stage While Hundreds Laughed — Then He Showed Me the Locket

Of vanishing.

Of the world simply closing over the space where she had been, as though she had never existed at all.

It is, when you think about it, the deepest fear there is, older and more universal than the fear of death itself: the fear not of ending, but of ending without a trace, of being erased so completely that it is as if you never were.

And most of us, when someone we love dies, unwittingly do the very thing they feared.