Grieving people do that; she had watched families do it a hundred times, some out of love and some out of an inability to sit in a house with the smell of somebody still in it.

A doctor had certified a natural death.

Doctors do that.

That is their job.

And her daughter had never mentioned cremation.

Which was true, and which meant nothing, because people don’t tell their mothers everything, and because a woman of thirty-six has no particular reason to have a fixed position on her own remains.