Our little group walked through her house. It was empty and cold and dead just like she was. We’d all been in her house before, known what it was like when she was alive.

Instead of the bright and warm rooms, it was now resigned to white walls. It felt like a hospital, but it was really more like a morgue. Her will had left her things to all of us, but nobody wanted anything. Still, we came for one last look. The bare walls and stacks of plain brown cardboard boxes, full of her things, didn’t exactly have the effect we’d hoped.

I missed her, and I missed her horribly. The sound of her voice, the way she could bring life to a room, and the way her nose would crinkle the slightest when she laughed.

“It’s funny, really,” I said, even though it wasn’t funny at all, “how in the end we’re all just cardboard boxes.”