My shoes leave heavy imprints in the soggy grass as I trudge back to the car. My mom’s already in the driver’s seat, ready to speed away from this place forever, but I couldn’t leave, not yet.

I look back at the hole in the ground. At first it was empty, just a gaping hollow ripped into the earth, but now it’s filled. With a coffin. My dad’s coffin?

I can hardly bring myself to even think the words. They sound like a joke, a lie. I don’t even believe myself.

I feel the urge to dash through the graveyard, to jump on top of the coffin and be swallowed up into the earth. I can’t leave him alone, I can’t leave him with an unforgiving wall of soil pressing down on him for the rest of his life. But there is no rest of his life. It’s already over. All over.

So I walk. I walk back to the car and hunch over, my back aching with the force of the shame and regret of leaving him behind.

“Goodbye.” The words slip out from beneath my tongue in a coveted whisper, coating the air with a sickening shade of misery.

As the car rolls out of the imposing cemetery gates, sobs roll out of my sunken eyes, and I can’t believe this could possibly be goodbye.