The pastor—a young man I’d never met before, hired by the funeral home—delivered his eulogy with the enthusiasm of someone reading a phone book. Generic platitudes about eternal rest and loving memories floated past me like smoke. I wanted to stand up and tell him the truth: that George Holloway had built three houses with his own hands, that he could identify any bird by its call, that he cried watching old war movies but never at funerals, that he made me laugh even when I didn’t want to, especially when I didn’t want to.

Instead, I sat still, hands folded in my lap, while this stranger talked about a man he’d never known to an audience that didn’t exist.

The morning had started with a text from Peter. Not a call—a text. Seven words that felt like a slap: “Sorry, Mom. Something came up. Can’t make it.”

No explanation. No apology that held weight. Just a digital shrug from the son who’d once fallen asleep in George’s lap while his father read him adventure stories, George’s deep voice turning dragons into friends and oceans into playgrounds.

I’d stared at those seven words for a full minute before checking Celia’s Instagram. Because that’s what you do now, isn’t it? When your children won’t answer your calls, you learn to track their lives through curated photographs and filtered lies.

There she was, posted just an hour earlier: champagne flutes raised with three girlfriends, their faces flushed with bottomless mimosas and the particular kind of laughter that comes from not having a care in the world. The caption read “Sunday brunch with my girls! Living our best lives!”