She keeps checking her phone under the pew, and I want to tell her: yes. Good. Check it. Be somewhere else for a second. Nobody here will love you less for needing air.
They have filled the room with lilies, which is strange, because in forty years I never once saw anyone in this family buy a flower. And there is coffee somewhere down the hall, I can smell it, that thin church-basement coffee in the paper cups that go soft at the rim, and my whole body would ache for a sip of it if I still had the body to ache with.
Look at them all touching each other. The way the young one lets herself be folded into an uncle she does not even like, cheek against a scratchy suit shoulder, both of them warm, both of them here, skin against skin and not one of them marveling at it. A hand finds a hand on the pew.
Someone straightens someone's collar without being asked. They are passing tissues down the row like a small tender assembly line and they think they are sad.
They are so lucky. Every one of them gets to walk out those doors into the ridiculous cold, and grumble about parking, and be too full at the lunch after, and forget half of what was said today, and go home to a sink of dishes they will resent.
I would trade eternity for one dull Tuesday of it.
Blow your nose. Eat the sad casserole. Argue in the car on the way home. And when you get there, stand in your kitchen a moment longer than you need to, warm and heavy and gloriously bored.
I am so glad it was me who had to leave first, and not you.