Chapter Three — The Closed Casket
I want to describe, honestly, the specific, compounding grief of burying nb a closed casket, understanding now, with the clarity of everything eventually revealed, exactly how much additional trauma that specific circumstance had added to an already devastating loss.
Our family made the decision, guided by the funeral director’s gentle but clear recommendation, not to view Vera’s remains given the severity of the fire damage — a decision that meant I never had the specific, painful but ultimately clarifying experience of actually seeing my sister’s body, an absence that, I understand now, likely contributed to a lingering, unprocessed uncertainty that some part of me apparently carried throughout the following decade, even as I worked consciously, deliberately, to accept and process her death through years of dedicated grief therapy.
