Because it taught me, in the starkest way a lesson can be taught, that family is not a matter of blood at all — that the word means something entirely different from what I had believed my whole life.

I had grown up understanding family the way most people are raised to understand it: as a fact of biology, a fixed and permanent bond that exists because of shared blood and therefore cannot be broken, that must be honored and forgiven and returned to no matter what, because they are your family.

It is one of the deepest assumptions a person carries.

And I watched it shatter, completely, in the space of a single funeral.