Today is my brother's birthday. Friday was aunt SJW's birthday. Friday was also aunt S's funeral. A grey weekend filled with many odd coincidences, much sorrow and crying and silence. And while the priest spoke, so many memories of her yellow Beetle convertible (name: WienerSchnitzel) beeping away in the driveway, and my brother and I scrambling across the gravel giggling & happy to be wisked away by our fun bandanna-sporting auntie to places such as the beach or to summer carnivals or the Bronx Zoo or the Ice Capades or to Beatlemania.

But Friday we all could have killed her for leaving us so suddenly and brutally. A violent impact and explosion and we are shell-shocked. Some of us paced the parlor floor bent and with queasy expression as though just punched in the stomach. Many were sobbing and dumbfounded having been entirely unaware of her speeding illness. But now in hindsight, it all makes sense - how in 1998 at my brother's sunny Malibu wedding, when she had that mysterious nosebleed - that she knew she was doomed. She just didn't tell anyone about her diagnosis, not her best friend, not her sister. She didn't even tell herself, or if she did, she quickly forgot. The mind may evade but there's no denying the body's knowledge of disease. And today so many of us are quietly sitting & listening to the icy rain tap out rhythms on the window panes, wondering how we will fill this crater.