I stopped at the door of the viewing room at the funeral parlor and ran my hands down the front of my suit as if I was checking to make sure everything was in place. I didn't want to go inside.

I didn't want to say goodbye.

"Mike?" Mom was standing outside the little office at the end of the hallway. I'd gone in there with her earlier when she came to pay for the funeral.

"It's okay, Mom." Looking inside the room, I could see Dad standing by the casket with one of my uncles, looking down at the person who had been his mother. My grandmother.

I didn't know where they'd found all the pictures. Some of them were obviously glamor shots from the fifties and early sixties—soft focus and strong lighting, natural lips, gaze focused off to the side of the camera. Shoulders bared or teased with fur wraps.

But others were family photos, casual pictures. Grandma in a bathing suit at the beach, surrounded by her children at Christmas, dancing with my grandfather at a wedding someplace. Asleep in a hammock, playing cards with friends, studying a script. Casual shots from behind the scenes during filming. A few from when she was older. There was one of me leaning against her legs when I was a small child, another of her and all of us grandchildren.

She was so beautiful.

I procrastinated among the pictures, then reading the little cards attached to the flowers exploding over the space around the casket. Dad finally moved away from the casket, but even then, it was hard to make myself walk up to and look down at her. I wasn’t sure I could stand to see her like that, lifeless and still.

In the end, it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. Yes, it looked like her. Shrunken, and older, but still recognizable as the woman who'd first taught me how the lift of an eyebrow and a slight tightening at the corner of your mouth could completely change the meaning behind the lines you were speaking. Who’d taught me how to project my voice without roughening it and how to emote straight into the camera so the audience were convinced I was looking right at them.

But something was missing. It took me a while staring at her, examining her face, her hands, her hair, but it finally hit me—what was missing was her. All the animation, the humor, the love that had always breathed off her skin was gone, and what was left was a shell that looked like her, but wasn't her. It should have made me feel better, but all it did was make me miss her even more.

Mr. Ferguson, who owned the funeral home, stepped into the room and said a few words to my dad, then began circulating through the rest of the family. When he got to me, he said, "Micah, I'm glad you made it home. She was a great old lady, your Grandma." His voice was the perfect funeral director's voice, a priest's voice, rich with sympathy and warmth. I filed the tone of it away for later, in the part of my brain that memorized those sorts of things. That was something I had from her as well.

"She was," I agreed.

"We're going to line you all up by family, with the oldest of her children closest to her and their family with them,” he told me and herded me away from the casket.

Dad was Grandma's oldest, so he was closest, then Mom next to him, then my older brother Colin, me, and my sister Tasia. My uncle Nigel stood on Tasia’s right, with his family stretched out past him. And on and on. She'd had four children—two boys, two girls. We were a big family.

Mr. Ferguson came around again, speaking low-voiced with my uncle and aunts and then finally my dad. He turned and nodded to the rest of us, and disappeared out the wide French doors into the entrance hall.

A few minutes later, the first of the visitors began to trickle into the room and I steeled myself for what I suspected would be a long, long night.