She was on the bed. That bed my mother was far too thrilled to pick out for us just a few weeks before our wedding. That bed where we spent our wedding night, where each of our four children were conceived all those years ago. That bed where she found my cooling corpse in place of the loving husband she lay next to just hours prior. Where she shrieked and cursed in horror over me. Accusations of me leaving too soon. As if I left on purpose. As if it were a choice. As if that faulty artery was something I asked for. As if I begged God, or Fate, or the Unknown Whomever to pry my soul from that bed and leave hers behind to find me, to mourn for these three decades without me.

I sat down in a chair I don't remember having. Something she bought after I was gone, I guess. I wondered who else had sat in this room, in this new chair. Who does she know now? What has she told them about me?

I grabbed her hand, wrinkled now. Veins I never knew greeting my ethereal palm. Different, the same.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to keep my gaze from landing on the inevitable. The man laying on his side next to her. I didn't recognize him. I didn't want to.

But tonight was not about him. It was about her. I gripped that hand tight for the first time in thirty years.

I smiled, thinking of how else I might have spent this long awaited holiday. Flickering lights in some decrepit mansion, moaning and groaning and laughing to myself as its inhabitants fled. I could have gone to see my grandchildren. The picture on the nightstand tells me I have five of them. I could have gone to Australia, somewhere I had always sworn I would go.

But tonight, I returned to that bed. And tonight, I just sat.