A Celebration of Life

The first person to take a selfie with Emily was a woman who hadn’t spoken to her since high school. She positioned herself beside the easel, tilted her head toward Emily’s framed photograph, and arranged her mouth into an expression of exquisite suffering and injury. Rachel stood and watched her take six pictures until the woman settled on one where the hall light shone off a tear that had collected convincingly beneath her right eye. 

“Do you mind?” Rachel asked. “There are other people waiting to pay their respects.”

The woman lowered her phone. “Sorry. It’s just so hard to really capture how much she meant to me to accurately show it to my followers.”

“Please go away.”

For a moment, neither of them moved. The woman glanced back at the picture, then at Rachel, clearly deliberating whether this potential confrontation would make good content. “Grief looks different on everyone,” she said, and went away to find better lighting for her livestream. 

Rachel’s sister, Emily, has been dead for nine days. She died on a Tuesday, driving home with a bag of groceries and a parking ticket in her glove compartment. She was thirty-four, four years younger than Rachel, chronically late to everything, and incapable of letting a restaurant choose a table for her. She hated lilies and carnations, which was unfortunate because the funeral home had arranged approximately a thousand of them around her portrait. Rachel had asked them not to, but they told her a close friend had already donated the flowers. 

Speaking of close friends, by six-thirty, the celebration of life was crowded with people who had apparently each experienced a tight-knit bond with Emily. Natalie, the woman who had taken selfies earlier, approached the microphone first when it was time to speak. She said they had been inseparable before college and marriage, and even somehow during the intervening sixteen years when they hadn't spoken. She described their bond as sacred. She spoke for eleven straight minutes about how Emily’s death had changed her, most of which concerned a bullet-point list of things Natalie had learned about herself. 

“I have been walking around with a hole in my heart,” she finally concluded. The audience murmured sympathetically. The microphone caught something making a small wet popping noise. Natalie looked down as a small circle appeared below the neckline of her dress. It expanded until Rachel could see through her chest to the gold curtains behind her. The edges of the hole were red and neatly puckered, reminding Rachel of a hole punched through a leather belt. 

A man screamed, and somebody dropped a glass that shattered on the floor of the hall. Natalie touched the absence where her sternum should have been, and her fingers passed through. She looked absolutely horrified until a woman near the front whispered, “Oh my God. She really loved her.”

Natalie straightened up and her face hardened. “I’m ok,” she told the people in the hall, most of whom were holding up their phones to capture the gruesome moment. “I am being so strong for Emily.”

Within three minutes, the footage had over a million views. The paramedics came, but Natalie refused treatment and transport. She explained her symptoms on her livestream and told her audience she believed Emily would want her to stay and keep sharing her truth.

Brandon, who had worked with Emily for one summer at a bank, stepped up to the microphone next. He wore a sweatshirt with EMILY STRONG printed across the chest. Beneath it was a QR code for a GoFundMe he set up in her honor. 

“People think grief is something you get over,” he said. “But I literally cannot breathe without her in this world.” His ribs spread with a sound like a stiff umbrella opening. Two slick, gray lungs uncoiled through his back and inflated above his shoulders. They then rose and trembled against the ceiling tiles, drawing air through thousands of tiny, porous mouths. The room erupted as Brandon fell to his knees. Rachel noticed Natalie looked offended that he had outdone her suffering spectacle. Someone tagged a video of Brandon's transformation with the hashtag #LoveNeverDies, and it quickly became the most popular search term in North America. 

After that, people stopped talking about Emily and started describing what her absence had done to them. A woman who once rented Emily an apartment announced she hadn’t eaten since hearing the news of her passing. Her cheeks instantly collapsed, and her clothes hung from her bones as she smiled and posed for photos with her teeth loose in their sockets. An old classmate declared that he cherished a spot on his hand where Emily had once accidentally brushed it over twenty years ago, and that her loss made his hand fall off into the buffet table, somewhere around the miniature quiches. People rushed to make a scene to comfort him. Nobody moved the hand until someone complained it was too close to the food. 

Every fresh injury inspired someone new to testify. Every testimony made each injury worse, and the worse it became, the more people gathered to admire the courage of its owner. 

Rachel noticed something else. When Natalie described herself as Emily’s sister in “every way that mattered,” Rachel realized she couldn’t remember the name of the street she and Emily grew up on. When Brandon declared he’d known Emily better than anyone, Rachel struggled to recall their last Christmas together as kids. She searched for it with increasing panic. There had been a tree, hadn’t there? Gifts? Her sister sitting cross-legged on the carpet complaining about… No. There was nothing. 

Across the room, Craig stood by the punch bowl, anxiously holding his car keys. He was Emily’s husband, and no one invited him to speak. Rachel approached him. 

“Are you seeing all of this? What the hell is happening?” Rachel asked.

He nodded toward a woman whose eyes burst after she said she'd cried every tear she had for days for Emily. “I saw a guy walk up to her and ask if she could do it again so he could video it and post it,” Craig said. 

“Should someone stop this?” She asked. 

“Would they stop?”

Rachel looked around and saw Natalie setting up a ring light and leaning into its sterile white glow. She told her livestream participants that none of them understood what she'd lost.

“Hey!” Rachel yelled. “She was my sister.” 

Several people turned and looked at them both. Natalie’s face hardened. “Nobody is taking that from you.”

“But you barely knew her. You haven’t talked in nearly two decades.”

“That’s incredibly invalidating.” A few guests nodded in agreement with Natalie. 

Rachel started feeling a hot pressure behind her ribs. An overwhelming urge rose to explain, to make them understand exactly what had been taken from her. She wanted to tell them she had been there when Emily was born, that she’d taught her how to ride a bike, that Emily could be cruel and funny and impossible and she’d loved her deeply anyway. Instead, she only managed to say, “I lost more than any of you.” 

The room went completely silent for the first time since the celebration of life started. A sharp pain opened beneath Rachel’s breastbone. Large masses of organs and something else shifted and rearranged. A fold of skin appeared on her wrist, shaped like a child’s hand wrapped around it. Someone gasped. Someone else said, “She’s so lucky. Her grief is so authentic.” Rachel had never felt so ashamed or so relieved. 

Rachel’s phone vibrated. Someone had tagged her in a video of the confrontation with Natalie. The caption read: REAL SISTER FINALLY SPEAKS OUT. For one exquisite moment, she wanted to read all the comments and see what people were saying about her. Craig grabbed the phone out of her hand.

“Come out to the lobby with me,” he said, walking out the door before she could respond.

By that point, the videos posted by everyone at the celebration of life had reached five hundred and forty-two million people. On the television behind the open bar in the lobby, a news anchor with blood running from his ears and tear ducts described the entire nation as heartbroken. The feed cut to a senator, who said he had been personally shattered by the tragedy. Both of his arms cracked, raining down pieces of muscle and bone on either side of him during his press conference. His approval rating skyrocketed afterward. The feed cut again to a hospital doctor reporting a new category of injury called Complicated Bereavement. A patient stopped him and complained live on the air that the term diminished her grief experience. So, he immediately renamed it Unprecedented Grief. 

Craig and Rachel pushed through the front doors out into the parking lot. The whole area was jammed with cars and packed with thousands of people who had traveled from all over to attend the celebration. Most had their phones out in front of them and wore expressions of desperate anticipation. One man shouted that Emily was his entire world. His legs immediately fused to the asphalt and his torso inflated to the shape of a small planet. His upper body detached and began floating into orbit around the parking lot. Three local news stations chased him through the air, trying to interview him. 

They got into Craig’s car, and the keys no longer fit the ignition. His wedding ring slipped off his finger and shrank down to a size neither of them could see. 

“Why the fuck is this happening?” Rachel asked.

He stared down at the last place he could see his ring. “I really don’t know.”

“Tell them all you were married to her.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want them to be able to use that too.”

Rachel’s phone was vibrating again and Craig handed it back to her. The notification took her to a video of a popular celebrity crying next to a framed photograph of a woman who had been replaced by white-gray static. The celebrity said that Emily had taught her that life was precious. She then asked her viewers to use the memorial discount code provided next time they needed to buy toilet paper. 

Rachel looked up at the funeral home's enormous illuminated sign. At some point, someone had changed the lettering from “A Celebration of Life for Emily Garvey” to “A Celebration of Loss for Everyone.” 

Midnight was approaching, and the sky had split. A popular news anchor announced that the loss had torn his whole universe apart. A hairline fracture appeared between Orion and the moon. The stars shifted and bent around it. People filmed the fissure opening as it widened, revealing something pale and fibrous on the other side of the wound. A world-famous singer declared that parts of time had stopped when Emily died. Across the world, clocks froze, children remained stuck in a halfway fall off of playground equipment, and airplanes hung motionless above airports. Still, the videos kept uploading. Over a billion people posted that nothing would ever be the same without Emily. All of the tides reversed, and the continents flexed and stuttered like sleeping animals with apnea. Random people just started sprouting new organs dedicated to producing only pain. Nobody was frightening for long because the sympathy rolled in, and the footage being posted grew increasingly extraordinary. 

Rachel and Craig returned to the hall. Even if they got the malformed keys to work, the road outside the parking lot now twisted into a loop that the car would never be able to negotiate. Inside, Natalie was an empty walking silhouette of herself, bordered only by thin raw flesh. The audience could see nearly straight through her as she repeated, over and over, that her emptiness was greater than anyone else’s. She had somehow connected her phone to the projector in the hall, and her livestream played out on the wall behind the speaking podium. Brandon’s lungs had completely covered the ceiling and grown through it. They filled the attic, breathing the words from the livestream comments in and out in ragged, wet coughs. Every time the lungs spoke someone's comment, the author thanked Brandon for his vulnerability. 

The framed memorial picture now just showed a blank chair. Rachel stared at it. She knew a person was once sitting in that chair; she knew there had been a smile, brown eyes, a crooked front tooth repaired after a childhood bike accident, or was that her own tooth? She reached up and touched her mouth uncertainly. 

“Craig,” she whispered. “What was her name?”

He opened his mouth, and nothing came out. His eyes filled with tears and he began to shake. Rachel thought he was about to collapse into the writhing insanity that everyone else had gone to. Instead, he pressed the heel of his hand against his face and struggled to remember his wife’s name without it being performative for anyone. 

Rachel pulled her phone back out. Thousands of calls, texts, and new notifications made it almost impossible to use. She opened her voicemail and found one from a caller with no name. She played it. 

“Hey, idiot. I found your sweater. Turns out, it was actually my sweater. You can be wrong and still come for dinner on Sunday. Call me, bitch!”

She covered her mouth. Her sister’s voice. There was nothing noble or inspirational about her, unlike the version of her in all of the speeches and the videos and the memorial posts she’d seen throughout the day. She was just a little congested, mildly annoyed, and alive. Then Rachel became the first person who cried that night without checking whether anyone noticed. 

The voicemail hissed and another voice, low enough to make the floor buckle and swell, emerged through the interference. 

“WE LOVED HER FIRST.” 

The walls of the hall had turned completely transparent. Beyond them, the sky had filled with faces too large to belong to anything that could rationally be classified as living. Their mouths opened to reveal beams of spiral galaxies and their eyes were black regions where light went to die. One wore the moon like a blister on its lower lip. They were pushing from the outside of the universe, jostling for a better view. One broke through whatever thin sheen of reality was keeping them at bay and announced that it had known Emily before there were stars. Another came through and insisted it had grieved for her since before time began. Reality rushed to accommodate itself to both assertions. Fossils spilled out of the ground bearing Emily’s name. Ancient stone temples sprouted like weeds with walls carved of pictures of the accounts of her passing. Her death immediately became a turning point in every civilization’s oldest stories. 

Rachel’s phone buzzed, and the notification was for a post from an account named “The First Light.” It read: I AM COMPLETELY DEVASTATED BY THIS LOSS. The post had over ten trillion likes. Above the clouds, one of the faces exploded into a galaxy that started folding in on itself. Stars burst from it like teeth from a broken mouth. Something next to it, if such a word could describe the scale and position at which these events unfolded, was enormous, and it stripped the outer layer of skin from a nearby nebula. It held the bloody radiance up for others to see. 

The entirety of the epoch broke. Light was bouncing off Rachel’s eyes before the light was created, and the universe contracted around this competition. It was a race to see which vast intelligence could make itself more wounded, more ancient, and more deserving of witness. 

Rachel tried to pull up the voicemail one last time, but the phone was now completely empty of information. The universe itself spoke instead. Its voice was the sound of every throat in existence attempting to form the same words.

“NO ONE HAS SUFFERED MORE THAN I HAVE.”

To prove it, the universe tore itself apart. There was no sky, no funeral home, no Rachel, no Craig, no Emily. No past that ever existed where a woman had been late to dinner after failing to negotiate a parking ticket, which resulted in her speeding and crashing her car. Nothing remained to remember any of it except for the thing outside creation resting in the perfect silence of its victory. After one impossibly long moment, it understood that nobody was left to observe what it had endured. Its anguish was magnificent, and its sacrifice was unprecedented. It had destroyed everything there was, but no one was left to tell it how brave it was. 

So it made an audience. It stretched out the first new dimensions. It filled the dark with hydrogen, rolled out the stars, and assembled worlds on which little creatures might someday develop mouths, eyes, and their own desperate need to be acknowledged. It was patient. It waited for the creatures to build homes and languages and communities. It waited for them to build communication networks and technology through which they could explain themselves to strangers. When the first creature turned on the first glowing screen and looked down at it, a post was waiting. 

I didn’t know Emily personally, but this has really affected me.

The creature considered what this meant for a moment before absently clicking the like button.