Just after I turned nine,
my great-aunt Jennie died of cancer.
At the funeral, her brother
George felt a pain in his back
and four months later
we buried him. Put to bed late, after
the funeral reunion
with its straight-faced family jokes,
I lay awake, repeating
a sentence over and over
in my head: It was as if
I read it in a book: ‘Then, when
he was only nine
years old, “Death became a reality.”’
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