My parents shared my blood, and had raised me, and were, by every conventional definition, my family.

They did not come.

Great Aunt Florence, whom I saw perhaps once a year, an old woman I barely knew, drove seven hours through the night because a neighbor mentioned my name.

And Jonathan’s parents, who shared no blood with me at all, who were mine only by marriage, held me upright between three caskets while weeping for their own dead son and grandchildren.

The people obligated to me by blood abandoned me.