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The night endured without a breath or a whisper. I was already six feet underground when the time came to leave; dead and buried, last of my grace spoiled by the invective required to close the casket lid. The funeral lasted the entire weekend, no eulogy -- just a change of course mentally followed by resolute action. We cannot be such strangers to ourselves. 

She appeared with their faces on the screen and it elicited a roiling vitriol in the core of me. It was an autonomic response that I instantly felt both ashamed of and justified in. The tangled webs we weave. I thought, this is no longer about empathy because a million other possibilities have existed between then and now, and yet here we are. Screen dark and mic off I had told her that we were still finishing dinner, that the call was opened just as a formality in order to let everyone in, to begin without me, I would be there shortly. It had been a week of meetings already and I was at the table with Dan, mid-sentence and mid-meal. But, they persisted. The questioning and beseeching and then whispering when an answer didn't come, and then my name, over and over. It's no longer about empathy, it's the pageantry of it all. And of course it became impossible to ignore, a zero sum game that ends with two sides in the negative and the one with all the chips has long since left the table, and behind closed doors (maybe even your own closed doors) you're a monster for seeing it that way.  So a short meal turned into an uncomfortable invitation into a world that I shamefully find irritating but that also makes me insurmountably sad. In the same way that thinking about a dog named Ranger in Prescott Arizona makes me sad. Death by a thousand cuts. 

A seed was planted and a weed appeared. Sometimes your vision just isn't the thing that comes to fruition and I would tell you to focus on the parts that you can control and let go of the rest if that didn't end in a sad and solitary loneliest leaving. You can gnash your teeth and claw and scratch and some boulders will never budge. A prayer, a supplication to someday understand and find peace with it. And that when you rise from the grave in order to begin anew, there will exist clarity and grace.