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”
And then, before he could produce any receipt, an enormous and unnatural tiredness came down over me like a curtain, heavier than any sleep I’d ever felt, and pulled me under.
I understand now what that tiredness was.
At the time I only knew that I could not keep my eyes open, and that my husband was watching me fail to keep them open with an expression I would spend a long time afterward trying to forget.
I went to sleep in my own bed, drugged, beside the man who had drugged me.
I woke in a box in my mother’s living room while the people I loved most in the world sorted through what I’d left behind.