Nobody from my family came to my husband’s funeral. Not even my parents nor my best friend. “Ma’am, are you sure no one else is coming?” the funeral director asked, checking his watch for the third time.

 

Part 1

The funeral home was quiet in the way hospitals are at 3 a.m.—air thick with what isn’t being said. Rows of folding chairs waited like patient strangers. The roses I’d chosen were starting to lean, their heads heavy, the water in their vases gone cloudy at the bottom. Outside, late winter pressed a gray palm against the windows. Inside, the clock over the door tried to convince me time still knew how to move.

“Ma’am?” the director asked again, softer. “Are you sure?”

I looked at my phone. Twenty-two missed calls from the same group thread: my family. My screen bloomed with photos—my mother in a blush-pink dress, my father in a navy jacket one button too tight, my sister Chloe in white wide-legged jumpsuit with a glass of champagne aloft, the ring on her finger catching light like it wanted applause. They stood under a balloon arch that kept insisting on party. Chloe & Jake—She Said Yes! A smiling emoji with hearts for eyes. A video of a toast. The caption: Perfect day for celebrating.

Perfect. While my husband’s name was printed in black on white on the program in my lap.

I silenced the phone. The silence ate the room and then settled. I am a pediatric nurse. I am good at waiting in rooms like this for news to arrive. For the first time in eighteen months—since we heard the word that would colonize our vocabulary—there was no news left to arrive. Cancer had done what cancer sometimes does, even when you throw everything that is human and good and scientific at it. Eighteen months of ports and pills and machines whose whir become as familiar as the way your person breathes. Eighteen months of night-shift nurses bringing me coffee when I was supposed to be the one doing the bringing. Eighteen months of David—my David—fighting harder than anyone should have to and apologizing when he couldn’t carry groceries.

“Funerals are so depressing,” my mother had said on the phone two days earlier, the words as careful as a person stepping around a puddle. “Chloe really needs our support for her big day. You understand.”

I had said nothing because you cannot argue with a person who has already defined your reality as unreasonable.

A text buzzed. Sorry, honey. Chloe really needed us today. We’ll visit David’s grave later.

Later. Like grief could be penciled into a Sunday after brunch if the weather cooperated.

The funeral director cleared his throat and gestured toward the open door to the small chapel. “When you’re ready.”

I walked in alone. A handful of David’s coworkers sat in the third row. Our neighbors, the ones who shoveled our steps when I was at the hospital nights, sat in back. The chaplain from the oncology floor came and folded himself into a chair like a man who has done this before and still believes he should.

We sang “Be Thou My Vision” because David loved the way the third verse jumps an octave and makes you reach for it. The chaplain read Psalm 23 because sometimes cliché is medicine. I spoke. I don’t remember what I said. It doesn’t matter; the words were for me, for a room that could hold them, not for the ones that would have turned them into noise. Afterwards the director handed me the guest book as if holding it would make the names more than ink.

In the parking lot my hands shook so hard I dropped the pen that came with it. When I bent to pick it up, my phone lit again. Can’t miss Chloe’s big moment. You understand, right? She asked me to be in her wedding party. It was from Jessica—my best friend since sophomore year, the girl who smoked peppermint cigarettes behind the gym and cried into my shoulder when her cat died, the woman who had sat with me during David’s second surgery and held my hand until the anesthesiologist shooed her away. She had known him longer than she had known her fiancé. But now: You understand.

The word understand can be an absolution or a weapon. I pressed my thumb until it hurt and did not reply.

When I got home, the apartment felt like a place I used to live. In the kitchen, the mug David favored was in the sink, a brown crescent at the bottom where coffee had cooled. The throw blanket we’d argued about (“It’s scratchy.” “It is textured.”) lay on the couch, one corner folded into itself like a wound. I put the funeral program on the table and stared at his name in print again. A person’s whole life reduced to bold and small caps. I washed the mug. I folded the blanket. I stood in the doorway of our bedroom and wondered how long you are supposed to keep your hands to yourself in your own life while you wait for something to change that cannot.

A family dinner invitation arrived a week later, polite as a subpoena. Let’s get together. We miss you. I went because I am either bad at boundaries or very good at hope. The restaurant had the kind of lighting that flatters no one and a menu that made my grandmother whisper the prices under her breath. My mother reached across the table and patted my hand like a nurse doing bad bedside.

“Emma’s finally ready to move on,” she announced to the table like she was introducing a dessert. “I have the perfect man for her. My friend’s son. He’s a doctor.”

“Mom,” I said. “David’s been gone for three weeks.”

“Exactly,” she said, relief loosening her voice. “You can’t wallow forever. David would want you to be happy.”

David would want me to sleep without wondering if the oxygen tube had kinked under the blanket. David would want me to eat something green and then something ridiculous and then to make fun of a Netflix movie. David would not want a blind date like a tragic game show in a dining room with a fake fern. I put my napkin on my plate and stood up without knocking a chair over.

Outside, the night was soft and too warm for the calendar. I leaned against a car that wasn’t mine and breathed like a person who had a choice.

The phone calls about money started the next morning, gentle as sharks. “Have you thought about the life insurance?” my mother asked, the words floating out of her like a shopping list. “Maybe invest it with your uncle’s firm. He could make sure you’re smart with it.” My aunt called. “You know, dear, David always said he wanted to help family. Maybe now is the time.” Chloe texted. What do you even need all that money for? You’re young. You’ll remarry. A winking emoji that made me want to throw my phone across the room and then hug it for company.

They had skipped his funeral. They remembered his policy number.

I stopped answering. When I picked up a bag of groceries and my phone slipped, a notification popped from a group chat I didn’t know I was in. How should we handle Emma’s drama when the funeral is over? Chloe had written. She’s being way too emotional about this. We need to help her move on. There were heart reactions under the message. A thumbs up from Jessica. My stomach rolled like a car on black ice.

I started eating lunch alone in a small break room at work that smelled like microwave popcorn and lemon cleaning wipes. I told myself I needed quiet. I did not tell myself I was hiding. In the afternoons, the oncology social worker, Maria, walked past with coffee and sometimes paused. She had lost her husband three years earlier; I knew because she had a way of looking at you that made you feel seen without having to perform it. She sat with me once and opened a granola bar as if she had come specifically to share it.

“Grief shows you who people are,” she said, breaking it in half. “The ones who disappear were never really there to begin with. That hurts worse because it feels like loss on top of loss. But it is also information.”

David’s coworkers became my oxygen. Tom, his best friend at work, started a text chain and a schedule: Monday dinners at a diner that sells pie by the slice; Thursday check-ins even if it was a “thumbs up” or a dumb GIF; Saturdays when they came by and knocked on the door like men who had been told to be wary of vulnerability and decided to walk into it anyway. “We’ll sit,” Tom said the first night, standing awkward in my living room holding takeout, “or we’ll not sit. Whatever you need.” They told stories about David I had never heard—the time he fixed the office coffee machine with a paperclip and a prayer; the way he stayed late to help a new hire debug a thing that he didn’t have to. They missed him for the same reasons I did, which made the missing feel like a quilt instead of a hole.

At the weekly support group, we went around the circle and said our names and our losses and sometimes only the first part because the second was too heavy to lift that week. We cried and rolled our eyes at platitudes and handed each other Kleenex and phone numbers. The hospital chaplain came and sat and didn’t say God until someone asked him to, which is the only time I have patience for God. Maria kept the circle from becoming a spiral. “You are not a problem to solve,” she said. “You are not a project. You are a person. Grief is a place, not a sentence.”

If my family had looked closely, they would have seen that I was not a ghost. I was learning to say no.

The breaking point came like an invitation: an embossed card on heavy paper with a flourish that felt like a dare. You are joyfully invited to celebrate the marriage of Chloe & Jake—on David’s birthday.

Chloe called to exhale excitement at me. “It’s perfect timing,” she gushed. “Everyone will be in such a good mood. And it’s right before wedding season gets too busy.” She laughed. A sound that had delighted me when we were children hurt like a scraped knee now. I hung up without saying goodbye. It felt like a small rebellion. It felt like a new kind of kindness to myself.

That night Tom came over with a shoebox. “He wanted you to have this when you were ready,” he said, and put it on the coffee table like a very small coffin. It held letters in two handwritings: mine to David from years ago saved because he was a sentimental fool; his to me written in the last weeks when his hands hurt but he insisted on doing one more thing that would love me after he couldn’t. One envelope had my name and then a line that wasn’t a name but might as well have been.

Emma, he wrote in blue ink I recognized from shopping lists and Post-it notes on the bathroom mirror. This isn’t a plan. This is a permission slip. Your family loves you the way they know how. That way has hurt you. They asked you to be small so they could fit into themselves. I can’t make them different. I can ask you to build a family that knows how to show up. Maria does. Tom does. My team does. These are your people now. Don’t apologize for that. We laughed at the idea of memorial services. I wanted mine to be pie and bad coffee and stories. If your family chooses balloons, go where the pie is. Love, D.

He had always made grief sound like something we could hold.

Chloe called three days before her wedding—David’s birthday—loud with decisions. “You have your dress, right?” she asked.

“I do,” I said.

“Don’t be so sad,” she said.

“I won’t,” I said, and hung up, then called Tom. “Let’s do it,” I said.

“Conference room’s booked,” he replied, not asking what it was because he had seen me decide on a good day and a bad one and knew either way I kept going. “Next door to the ballroom. They’ll never see it coming.”

“They don’t have to,” I said. “They can choose.”

 

Part 2

On the day of, I put on the bridesmaid dress I’d caved and bought because standing in the middle of their story would have been easier than standing outside. In the mirror I looked like a person practicing a role. When I got to the hotel, I didn’t go upstairs. I took the elevator down to a carpeted room with bad art and a long table and the sound of ice in a bucket. Tom stood there with a sheet cake from the grocery store with Happy Birthday, David in red script and a photo of us printed poorly on frosting. Maria carried a cardboard box with paper cups and a tin of coffee. David’s coworkers came in suits that didn’t fit quite right and care that did.

The hotel coordinator walked in with an expression that anticipated both apology and invoice. “You’re the group…?” she asked.

“Memorial,” I said. “Ten to fifteen people, maybe more.”

She nodded. “We’ll send coffee.”

“Thank you,” I said, and meant it in the way you mean it when ordinary kindness tastes like dessert.

I walked upstairs. The ballroom was a machine of celebration, the DJ already reading a crowd that hadn’t filled the room, the centerpieces too pink by half, Chloe’s smile too wide by whole. My mother saw me and her face shot relief and victory at me simultaneously.

“Emma!” she said, reaching for my hand like she could pull me into a happily-ever-after by force of will.

“Hi,” I said. I took a breath. “Excuse me,” I said, stepping onto the small stage where the band would play later. The microphone squealed because microphones always do when the thing about to be said is truer than the room is built to hold.

“Hi,” I said again. “I won’t take long.”

“You’re ruining—” my mother said, but I held up my hand and she closed her mouth because once or twice in my childhood I have seen her remember how to do that.

“For anyone who would like to honor David,” I said, and my voice shook once and then found the floor, “we’re celebrating his life next door. Today would have been his birthday.”

Someone laughed, a short disbelieving sound; then stopped when I kept going.

“I’m going to read something he wrote,” I said.

Chloe took a step. Jake put a hand on her wrist, whether to restrain or support I still cannot tell. My father stared at the floor. Jessica stood near the bar, eyes wide with the theatre of it.

I unfolded the letter. David’s handwriting made a lump form in my throat and then become resolve.

They told Emma she was being dramatic about my cancer, I read. They said she should focus on Chloe’s happiness instead of dwelling on my illness. They called it “helping” when they avoided the hospital. They said they were “giving her space” when she stopped calling because there was nothing left to say that didn’t sound like begging.

A clink; a glass on wood. The room’s oxygen changed; the way air feels in a thunderstorm before it chooses.

“My husband fought for eighteen months,” I said, voice steady now. “My family fought harder to avoid being inconvenienced.”

I held up my phone and the screen lit the room, screenshots arranged in tidy rows like exhibits: How do we handle Emma’s drama after the funeral?—Chloe. She’s being way too emotional.—Jessica. We’ll visit later.—my mother.

A cousin I hadn’t seen since high school put a hand to her mouth. An aunt straightened. The DJ looked at the floor. The decorations did not alter themselves.

“Cake and coffee,” I said, because words are sometimes another way to ask people to choose what kind of life they want to be in. “Next door. If you loved him, if you love me, if you believe birthdays should not be erased, there is a chair for you.”

Tom stepped to the corner, a quiet invitation. Maria put the coffee on the table as if it were sacrament. People moved. Some stayed—the ones who show up for balloons. Some went—the ones who show up for pie.

My parents approached, my mother’s mouth already forming the complaint that would become mythology if I let it.

“You’re ruining Chloe’s wedding,” she said.

“You chose a party over your son-in-law’s funeral,” I said, turning not unkindly. “Today you can choose again.”

“We’re your family,” my father said, and he looked like a man who had misplaced something priceless in a drawer and could not remember which one. I thought of David’s letter. They asked you to be small so they could fit into themselves. I stepped back.

“You are my relatives,” I said softly. “My family is where the love is.”

They stayed. Forty-three people came with me. We told stories. We gave him the memorial he deserved—the chaplain, a prayer he didn’t pretend would fix anything; Tom, the time they stayed up all night to rewrite a nasty piece of code and ate pancakes at dawn; a mother from the support group, how David had shown her four-year-old how to blow up a glove like a balloon and then pop it; a nurse from oncology, how David always said “please” even when the morphine was late. We sang “Be Thou My Vision” badly because the room wasn’t built for it and because we were crying and because perfection was not the point. We wrote notes to tuck into the trees in the park where we would scatter the rest later, the one with the hospital’s view in the distance. We ate cake from plates that bent in the middle and drank coffee that burned and it was good.

I went home, took off the dress, sat on the floor, and sobbed until there was nothing left in me but the sound of my own breath. Then I slept, and when the morning came, the apartment was still itself. The picture of David on the shelf hadn’t moved. The panic did not return with the sun.

Six months later, there is a nonprofit registered with a name that makes me laugh and cry at the same time—Where The Pie Is—and a mission that says: support for families abandoned by the ones who should have loved them when illness becomes inconvenient. We bring meals without asking for photographs. We sit in hospital rooms where people are dying and we do not comment on the way grief makes faces look. We make memorials with bad coffee and great stories in conference rooms next to ballrooms with better lighting. We pay rent for a month for a woman whose husband’s brothers forgot her after they posted in blue on Facebook. We hold hands without glancing at our watches.

My relatives call sometimes. Only when something breaks for them—emotion, money, the illusion that they are the center of the universe. I answer when I can. I do not hate them. I no longer let them write the minutes for a meeting they never showed up to. When I go to my parents’ for Thanksgiving, I bring a pie for the table and two to the hospital, and when my mother asks if I’m dating, I say “no” and change the subject to my work as if my work were not the thing that saved me. She sighs. She brings out photos of Chloe’s baby. I smile at the cheeks I would have kissed anyway. I leave the conversation before it turns into a knife.

Jessica texted once: I miss you. I typed Me too and then deleted it and wrote, I needed you in that room. She did not respond. She had always preferred rooms with better lighting.

Tom comes over on Tuesdays to make tacos and laugh at nothing. Maria sits at my kitchen table on Thursdays with papers that say things like grant and line item and together we translate grief into budgets. The oncology floor emails me when a mother is sleeping in a chair sideways and a nurse needs a spare blanket, and I bring one and tuck it around her because sometimes love is heat. The chaplain sits on my floor on Sundays with tea and asks me how my anger and my compassion are getting along. “Badly,” I say. “We’re working on it.” He nods like a man who knows working on it is the good news.

On David’s next birthday, we will be in the same conference room because the ballroom is booked for something called A Night to Remember. We will ask the hotel to send coffee and they will send more than we asked for because the coordinator who saw us once told the night staff and the night staff told the manager and now, apparently, we have a line item in someone else’s budget. We will sing badly again. I will read a new letter—not from David, from me—to the women who sit in the break room alone because their family called their grief a phase. It will say: You are not a phase. You are not too much. There is pie.

When people ask me what happened with my family, I tell them the shortest version I can. “They didn’t come,” I say. “I found the ones who did.” It is not a story that satisfies people who like villains and victories. It satisfies me. I am learning that is what matters.

I am twenty-nine. My hands know how to put in IVs and comfort babies and hold coffee cups between finger and palm without dropping them when someone says something absurd. They know how to take out a sticky note from a shoebox and put it in a frame. On it, in blue ink, is a permission slip in a handwriting I still dream sometimes: Go where the pie is.

So I do. And when I get home, I put two plates in the sink and I laugh, because no one told me grief and joy often leave dishes. I do the dishes. I dry my hands. I look at the photo of a man whose absence is presence and say goodnight out loud. Somewhere, a balloon pops in a ballroom and no one cheers. Somewhere else, a support group meets and someone says the word husband without the room flinching. Somewhere a nurse makes a bad cup of coffee for a good reason. And here, in a kitchen that holds me, I am not alone.

END!

 

Disclaimer: Our stories are inspired by real-life events but are carefully rewritten for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidental.