Her womb, surely no more than a raisin now, swelled and started deep inside her, remembering the feeling of his life forming inside her body, knowing that he was gone, that this innocent loving look was gone.

His face didn’t waver. She knew then that she was dying and she felt herself fill all the way up with gratitude. She moved her hand on top of Dune’s and giggled at Brendon’s face. It wasn’t her whole life flashing in front of her, it was the grace of her life, solid as flesh.

Her grandmother slipped away between Dune’s hands.

Dune didn’t know what made Mama Vivian look at her with such wonder, glee. Her grandmother passed on from life with her eyes open, unfocused. Dune felt gratitude in her bitterness, that her last family member managed to die peacefully, not contorted with pain.

Dune held on for hours, remembering. She let the night come and go, there by her grandmother’s side.

When the light was up the next morning, Dune slipped a rug under the chair by her grandmother’s bed and moved the body into it, sliding it down the hall. Getting down the stairs was the most challenging part, leaning her back against the wall and holding Mama Vivian up with her arms across her grandmother’s chest as if they were in the ocean, drowning.

She could feel the difference between this body and her mother’s—Mama Vivian seemed to have light bird bones in her old skin. When she finally got to the backyard, she placed the body into the same shallow fire pit where she had burned Kama, and then Red, out of this world. She used the last of the dry wood to get the fire going, as well as two old chairs and a table Brendon had started.

Dune went inside, upstairs to Vivian’s bookshelves. She pulled down Hegel, Marx, Plato, Herodotus, Mao, Castro, Malcolm, Baldwin and two of the twenty signed copies of Wes’s autobiography. She thought it fitting that Vivian should disappear in a flame of her favorite words. As the books transformed the fire into high reaching flames and the sheet started to burn, Dune looked away, overcome with longing.

“If I get sick out here, right now, I could fall into the fire and die really fast, before I soil myself. Maybe I could just throw myself on the fire.” She wondered if her soul would blend with Mama Vivian’s if she hopped on now, like death was a magic carpet ride and she just needed to figure out a way to climb on it and go.

Where did they do that, the wives throwing themselves on the burning bodies of deceased husbands, the expectation of sacrifice as a final duty? Images of fire and rivers far away flanked by monks in red robes flitted through her mind. She felt deep respect.