Great Aunt Florence drove seven hours straight from San Diego to be there, having learned of the tragedy not from any of my immediate family — who had not troubled to notify her — but from a neighbor.

Seven hours, an elderly woman alone on the highway, to sit beside me in an empty row, because a stranger had told her what my own parents would not.

I have thought a great deal, since, about the difference between those two facts: a mother twenty minutes away who could not come, and a great-aunt seven hours away who could not stay away.

That difference is the whole of this story.