We talked to her brother, a friend of my son's, and as it happens, my son texted at that time that he wished he could be there, so I was able to hold it up for his friend, a kind of long-distance yet local condolence.

My daughter was one of the best high school friends of the young woman who died, and as we walked up to her mother I told Moonglow that she needed to simply let her Mom give her a big long hug and cry. Moonglow was going to be a surrogate for her friend at that moment in time. Yup.

Do you remember the Münchhausen-by-proxy mother in the film The Sixth Sense? The father wasn't as bad as that, he was wearing a light green shirt, not red, but I had never met him before and if he hadn't been pointed out I wouldn't have recognized him as the father of a dead child by his demeanor. He of the ultra-fundamentalist bent.

Tomorrow is the funeral. I'll get a big enough dose of BS there to last me for weeks, but I'll slough it off and come check up on MOM before much time passes.