I can’t tell much from her silhouette. She’s sitting off to one side, her shoulders hunched, and toward the front is the box with the teddy bears. Or at least I think they’re teddy bears. Almost twenty years have passed, and I’ve avoided thinking about it. There are some things that float pretty free of time, chronology, the book of history, and the lies of the experts. In the early Eighties I went to a funeral as part of my entry into a world, a kind of border crossing.

It started as the golden light of afternoon poured through…