There was no dying.

There was a healthy woman arranging herself comfortably in a bed she had been placed in on purpose.

The mind does a strange thing when reality refuses to match what you were braced for.

For a long, floating moment I did not feel betrayed, because betrayal requires you to first understand what you’re seeing, and my understanding had simply stalled.

I had spent forty minutes rehearsing grief — composing, somewhere under the panic, the things I would say to my mother if these were her last hours, forgiving her in advance for a lifetime of small coldnesses because that is what you do at a deathbed.