My cousin just died, you say, and I hadn’t seen her in years, but for a while she was like a sister to me.

I’m sorry, he says, at the same time you say, Sorry, too, because a cousin you haven’t spoken to in years is not the same as a sister, and even if there’s no real metric to grief, there is, must be, a hierarchy of loss.

You touch cups again, sombrely this time, and sip, and finally break eye contact and look away, and neither of you says anything for a while, until he says, That’s twenty years ago now, and you say nothing, because what is there to say?

The blazing sunshine and high blue skies, t-shirt weather, the leaves just turning on the trees, a stupidly perfect day. The cool and calm of the mortuary chapel, old for Toronto, designed and built, you read, by John G. Howard in 1842. White brick and Georgetown stone, deep-set trefoil windows and the steeply pitched roof; a fine example of Gothic Revival architecture in Canada. In the little vestibule, the tinny bluegrass of Hey Duggee from your phone as the Squirrels arrived again and again at the Clubhouse to bake carrot cakes for the stoner bunnies; Roly, the excitable little hippo, and Happy, the crocodile with his adoptive elephant parents, Betty the octopus rocking up in her dad’s little 119orange submarine, Norrie the mouse and Tag the rhino, all leaping up, to Tilly’s delight, for their Duggee-hug; while in the nave the priest intoned and the mourners responded, standing and sitting and singing and weeping, and your cousin was no more.

We are all ashes and dust eventually, you think, but now she already was: her warm taut body, pressed next to yours in your sleeping bags zipped together, as she confided about a boy she’d kissed; her long brown legs in their blue shorts with the red piping taking the stairs two and three at a time, the tattoos she tried to give you both when you were twelve and she was fourteen with the spike of her compass and a cartridge of ink from your yellow Parker fountain pen, below your hipbone where neither of your mothers would see it, and where a smudge of blue dots still remains.

You think of all of this and you think how impossible it is that all of it’s gone; how the fact of its being gone makes none of it, nothing, feel true any more, not that people can ever really know each other, or truly love, or that it matters in the end if a marriage fails, or ever could have worked; and yet how can it all not matter?

The meals trolley has made its way to you. Your tray table doesn’t fold down over your daughter’s sleeping body, so he takes your meal on his too, arranges both little trays lengthwise.