great-grandmother had died. She had gone in her sleep.
“Peaceful.”
At the wake, my oldest cousin, Katherine, was sobbing. There were a lot of pretty, simple black dresses there. The thing about the service I remember most clearly was that I didn’t cry.
The sun shone down over the frozen turf on the morning of her funeral as my great-grandmother was lowered into the plot next to her husband.
As a young child, I habitually lay awake in bed hours past my ordered bed-time. My pillow would rest under the window to the street as I watched yellow and white rectangles from passing headlights swing from right to left or left to right. That night, I couldn’t sleep because I was terrified.
It wasn’t a fear of the dark that kept me up, even though each time the lights appeared and faded, blackness again washed over the room like the view out of the window from inside a sinking vessel.
I threw off the covers, got up, and walked down to the kitchen. My mother was still awake. I used to think she never slept. The green light on the oven had four digits.
“Why are you up?”
“What if when we die, there’s nothing? I don’t know, what if we don’t go anywhere?”
“What?”
“What if like heaven and hell don’t happen? What if it’s just black all around everywhere?”
“You don’t need to worry about that, Jack. You’re seven, you have a lot of time left. Go back to sleep.”
She filled me glass of water and handed it to me. I went back to my bedroom and closed my eyes.