They Held My Funeral While I Was Still Breathing. Then My Seven-Year-Old Nephew Looked Into the Coffin and Said, “Mommy, Aunt Madelyn Is Looking at Me”

My death had only ever been the cleanest available route to my things.

And when that route closed, he simply looked for another one, the way a river finds a way around a stone, feeling nothing about the stone at all.

Chapter 11 — The Signs I Explained Away

That evening my mother sat in the chair by the window and cried in a way that seemed to have aged her a decade since morning.

“I let them into our home,” she said.