Chapter 385

AMELIA Seeing my mother’s casket lowered into her grave is one of the most surreal moments of my life. How can someone that important, that precious, be contained in a wooden box? How can someone so full of life so suddenly be gone? How can the final page of the story of her life have been turned? I stare at the flower-draped pine, struggling to believe that she is actually inside it. It didn’t feel real until today. But seeing this, seeing her disappear into the ground, is starting to make it so, and that reality is brutal. It’s like my emotional tendons and ligaments are being stretched and torn, and my mind might never recover. I will never be the same shape again. The service was beautiful in its own way. So many people came to say goodbye to her. People she used to work with in her many jobs, friends from the neighborhood, the men and women who lived near her. Nurse Jenny. My mom touched a lot of lives, and it was moving to see them all there, paying tribute. I cried as I delivere