A whisper stopped the funeral cold — when the grandmother opened the coffin, a terrifying truth was revealed.

The silence of a funeral home is not like the silence of a library or a church; it is a heavy, pressurized quiet that feels as though it is waiting for something to scream.

I have spent forty years as an ER nurse, a career that taught me the specific, metallic scent of blood and the hollow look in a person’s eyes when the soul has decided to leave the room, so I thought I knew everything there was to know about death. I thought I knew how to navigate the geography of grief, how to sign the papers, how to hold the hand of the bereaved, and how to accept the finality of a flatline.

But as I stood over the white lacquer casket of my three-year-old granddaughter, Ava, alone in the dim viewing room of the Resurrection Chapel at 11:00 PM, my training failed me.

My mind, trained in triage and logic, told me that Ava was gone—a victim of a rare, aggressive encephalitis that had baffled her pediatricians. My heart, however, was beating a frantic rhythm against my ribs, a primitive drum that refused to synchronize with the facts I had been fed.

They said she died at 3:14 AM on a Tuesday. They said it was peaceful.

They lied.

Continue reading…