We find their memory too painful, and so we put it away.

We stop saying their name because saying it hurts.

We lock the dresses in the attic and demand that the family move on, the way Caleb did, and in our grief we accidentally complete the erasure the dead most dreaded, burying not only their bodies but their memory, letting them fade because remembering is too hard.

Julian refused.

That is the whole of what he did, underneath the dress and the promise and the walk.

He refused to let his sister be forgotten, refused to let her fade into the comfortable silence that grief prefers, and he did it in the most public, undeniable, impossible-to-overlook way he could conceive of: he put her in the light, on a stage, in front of six hundred people, and made them all see her.