From my vantage within the wide doorframe boundary, my confusion at the number of blankets momentarily forgotten, Mercy’s face was not her face. My legs carried me into the room autonomically, acting as dilating pupils, bringing me physically closer to better focus the image. As I approached, I realized I was wrong; it was Mercy’s face but withered. Her cheeks had sunken into concave pits, so too her eyes, the skin stretched tight but also wrinkled at the sharpened corners. The wrinkles were not because of age; she didn’t necessarily look older, but instead was husked out, used up, dried out, corpsed. Too shocked to feel concern for her well-being (If Is she sick? and What is wrong with her? were questions I considered, they quickly sank to the bottom of my after-midnight mind), I tranced in dreamlike thrall, moving closer still, to within arm’s reach, and my initial observation of her face not being her face was both right and wrong.

Thanks, bro.

Her face was also Kathleen Blanchet’s face, the deceased woman I helped serve at the inaugural meeting of the Pallbearers Club. This was no mere hey-I-saw-someone-at-the-mall-who-looked-just-like-you doppelgänger resemblance. This was a reveal. This was revelation. Had I been able to blink my eyes and transport back to the first October morning in the funeral home, this was the face that would’ve greeted me. Mercy and Kathleen were the same person. (At the writing of this almost a quarter of century later, I am as sure of that equivalence as I was in the ruinous moment of discovery. Though in mornings after and the years between, as you will see, I allowed for skepticism, possibility, and rationalization. But not anymore.)

This is fucking RIDICULOUS. I fixed the title page for you with angry cross-outs.