There was only my sister’s hurt feelings, and my failure to tend them.

I stared at that glowing screen until the small letters blurred into dark smudges, and I read it again, and again, waiting for it to mean something other than what it plainly meant.

But it meant exactly what it said.

Three days after I had buried my entire family, the message my mother chose to send me — the single communication she judged worth making — was to relay that my sister’s feelings had been hurt, because I had failed, on the morning I learned my children were dead, to call and wish her a happy birthday.

Something deep inside me went completely silent when I read that.