My stomach rumbles beneath the oversized SeaWorld T-shirt I slept in. Is it wrong to think of food when you just found someone you love dead? There is a definite not-rightness about it. But I can’t say it’s completely wrong. I’m not sure my stomach has gotten the message that Moony has died. Clearly my heart hasn’t, so how could my stomach? Only my brain is online right now, and it’s not telling anyone else. Not yet.

I contemplate having a bowl of cereal while I figure out what to do. I should make a list. Moony was always making lists—grocery lists, to-do lists, lists of weekly sins she needed to share in confession. She was big on lists. Lists provided structure, and she was big on structure. She would like it if I made a list about her. I register a small sting of emotion at this thought, but it doesn’t sink deeper than my clavicles, like a piece of ice lodged in the throat. Uncomfortable, sure, but you can still swallow around it.

I walk to the kitchen and take the magnetic pad of paper off the fridge. I decide cereal can wait. It would look wrong if I ate first. Moony always believed someone was watching. Mostly God. And not in a kindly, mother hen sort of way. More in a devious, gotcha sort of way. God was watching Moony, and Moony was watching me. I’m not watching anyone.

I sit at the table, the vinyl seat sticking to my naked thighs, and begin. I write #1.

With any plan of action, something always comes first, but it’s not obvious to me what that would be. It’s here that I realize I’m not thinking clearly. My brain may be online, but it’s not running on all cylinders. Even my metaphors are confused. I try to imagine myself as someone else, a total stranger. What would that person do if they found their grandmother dead? My stomach rumbles again, and all I can think about is cereal, but I refuse to eat.

It takes a good seven minutes, but I finally realize the first step. I am not cut out to handle this alone. So, I think there must be only one step for me. I write, Tell someone on the magnetic pad.

I could go next door. Eric and Damien would help me. But Moony hated them. In part because they’re gay—a grave indecency at best and an unpardonable sin at worst, according to her very non-PC, pre-Vatican II-era Catholic logic—and in part because their cockapoo always shit in our front yard. She would not appreciate them seeing her this way.

Moony didn’t have any real friends. Acquaintances, maybe, like the lady at the drugstore who always put extra peppermints in the bag when she got her medications refilled. But no one close. Moony didn’t let anyone close. Except me.