I’m standing in front of a Starbuck’s on Geary Street in San Francisco, clutching the handle of my red carry-on bag, trying to figure out my next move. It’s 7:06 AM in Union Square, and I can’t figure out if I should head to the airport and go home, or go see my mom.

The thing is, she’s been dead for an hour or so.

As you might expect in such a fresh dead mom scenario, I am sobbing. I’m hunched over at the waist. And I’ve stopped making sense to my husband over the phone. Only in this part of the world, in my home town, could a girl wail at approximately the decibel level of a foghorn and do a physical thing somewhere between davening and capoeira and go mostly unnoticed.

Of all the shitty things I’ve ever done to my mom, this now seems like the very worst, leaving her somewhere in the Comfort Care wing of UCSF, maybe still in her bed, the stick end of the chocolate See’s lollipop I had brought her still poking up out of a Styrofoam cup.