My name is Brooke Johnson, and the day we buried my grandmother was the day grief stopped being the worst thing in the room.
The cemetery sat just outside Seattle, tucked behind a line of evergreen trees that looked like they’d been painted in charcoal. The sky hung low and heavy, the kind of gray that makes everything feel quieter than it should. The wind cut through my coat and found the space between my ribs, as if it had a map.
I stood beside the casket of my grandmother, Dorothy, trying to focus on the simple, painful truth that she was gone. Dorothy had been the calm center of our strange family for as long as I could remember, the woman who brewed tea every afternoon and insisted that patience was the only real weapon a person needed in life. When the pastor finished speaking and people began to drift away in quiet clusters, I noticed my father watching me with an intensity that felt wrong for a funeral.