I mourned when my friend was widowed. Who mourned my divorce?   

Ineed to go to the shivah.

Of course, I was at the levayah. I hugged Shaindy tightly, trying to squeeze the pain out of her. But that was an almost out-of-body experience. It didn’t feel real, rather like a terrible dream I couldn’t wake up from.

But now, the dust has settled, the reality has hit me, and this pain is much harsher than the initial pain was.

I need to go to the shivah. I need to be there for Shaindy.

I don’t want to. I can’t.

It’s been a long day, a tichel-and-no-makeup kind of day, and I think I’m more grateful to my mother for having a hot supper on the table when I get back from work, than for anything else.

“Did you go to see Shaindy today?” she asks.

My stomach twists, and I feel what I just swallowed rising back up my throat.

“The levayah was only yesterday,” I say, but my voice sounds jelly-like. My mother looks at me weirdly, her eyes asking me why I haven’t moved into my best friend’s house to camp out at the shivah she’s sitting for her husband.

I need to go. I can’t believe I’m not there now. But all I want to do is lie in bed in my childhood bedroom I moved back into nine months ago and sleep until someone wakes me up to tell me Shaindy’s husband really is alive, the accident never happened, and I’m now remarried to someone stable so we can all live happily ever after.