“I know you’re sad, but you don’t have to be so selfish,” she said, demanding dating advice in the middle of my own mother’s wake.
This was my best friend of twenty years. A two-decade-long masterclass in being an emotional dumping ground for a world-class narcissist.
Every one of her minor inconveniences was a category five hurricane, while my actual, life-shattering tragedies were just static she had to talk over. I had swallowed my own grief and anger for years, chalking it up to loyalty and a shared history.
But standing there in a room full of mourners, her stunning lack of humanity was no longer a flaw I could ignore. It was a declaration of war.
She expected me to swallow my grief and cater to her as I always had, but she was about to become the star of a one-act play she never auditioned for, where my voice was the only thing on the script and the final scene was her own humiliation.
The Invisible Anchor: The Daily Tithe
The phone buzzes against the wood of my desk, a frantic vibration that can only mean one thing. Jessica. I glance at the caller ID, my stomach doing a slow, familiar clench. My cursor blinks in the middle of a budget projection spreadsheet that’s already threatening to give me a migraine.
I should let it go to voicemail. I really should. But the guilt is a pre-programmed response, a muscle memory trained over twenty years of friendship. I sigh, clicking the green icon. “Hey, Jess. What’s up?”
“Oh my god, Maria, you are not going to believe the day I’m having. It’s a total dumpster fire.” Her voice is a rapid-fire assault, leaving no room for a response. “So, first, the barista at Starbucks—the one with the stupid nose ring—completely messed up my order. I said *oat milk*, not almond. Does he not know I’m practically allergic? My whole system is going to be thrown off.”
I stare at a cell on my screen showing a thirty-thousand-dollar deficit. “That’s rough.”
“Rough? It’s just the beginning! Then I get to work and find out that Brenda from accounting copied my presentation idea. The one I told you about last week? The one about synergistic market integration? She just stole it. Can you believe the nerve? My boss is going to think she’s the genius, and I’m just… me.”
I close my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Jess, I’m really swamped right now. We have a quarterly review and…”
“I know, I know, you’re always busy,” she cuts in, the words a subtle jab. “But I just really needed to talk to my best friend. You’re the only one who gets it. David hasn’t texted me back since yesterday morning, and I’m starting to spiral. Do you think I should text him? Or is that too desperate? Maybe I should post a really hot story on Instagram so he sees what he’s missing…”
The drone of her voice fades into the background hum of the office. I think about my mother. About the call from the doctor this morning. The words “progressive decline” and “we need to discuss next steps” are a cold weight in my gut. I open my mouth to say something, to share even a fraction of this anchor dragging me down.
“Jess, listen, I got some news about my mom…”
“Oh my god, that reminds me!” she bulldozes on, seamless. “My mom called me this morning and spent twenty minutes complaining about her arthritis. It’s like, I have *real* problems, you know? A career, a dating life… I can’t just drop everything because her knee is acting up.”
I go silent. The space I tried to carve out for myself is gone, paved over and built upon in seconds. There’s no room for my mother’s illness in the towering skyscraper of Jessica’s daily grievances.
“Anyway,” she huffs, finally winding down. “I just needed to vent. I feel so much better. Thanks for listening, you’re the best. I gotta run, I have a spin class. Love you, bye!”
The line clicks dead. I’m left holding a silent phone, staring at a spreadsheet that suddenly feels insignificant. I didn’t say a single thing about my life. I was just a receptacle, a human voicemail box. And the worst part is, I feel a hundred pounds heavier than I did before I answered.
The Friendship Tax
Mark finds me staring into the refrigerator later that night, not seeing any of the food inside. He comes up behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and resting his chin on my shoulder.
“Tough day?” he asks, his voice a low rumble.
“The usual,” I mumble. “And a Jessica download.”
He sighs, a sound of profound, weary understanding. “Let me guess. A work catastrophe, a dating inconvenience, and a minor consumer complaint, all treated with the gravity of a UN Security Council meeting.”
I can’t help the small, bitter laugh that escapes me. “You forgot the part where she’s the victim in every scenario.”
“Ah, yes. My mistake.” He kisses my temple. “Did you get a chance to tell her about your mom?”
I pull a carton of milk out and shut the fridge door, turning to face him. “I tried. The topic of my ailing mother reminded her of her own mother’s annoying arthritis.”
Mark’s expression hardens just a little. He’s never been a fan of the dynamic. He calls it the “Jessica Tax”—the emotional price of admission I have to pay just to keep her in my life. He remembers the last time she had a “real crisis.” It was three years ago, when she decided to move apartments on a whim. She’d called me in a panic at six in the morning on a Saturday, sobbing because her movers had canceled.
Of course, I’d spent my entire weekend packing her mismatched kitchenware and hauling dusty boxes down three flights of stairs, all while she directed traffic from a stool, complaining about a chipped nail. Mark and our son, Leo, had ended up helping, too. At the end of it all, she’d thanked us by ordering a single pizza and then complaining that pepperoni made her bloated. She never once asked about the big work project I’d had to postpone to help her.
“Maria,” Mark says softly, pulling me from the memory. “This has been going on for years. It’s not a friendship. It’s a service you provide.”
“She’s just… a lot,” I say, the excuse sounding flimsy even to my own ears. “She’s been my friend since we were in our twenties. There’s history there.”
“History isn’t a blank check for bad behavior,” he counters. “Twenty years of taking doesn’t entitle her to a twenty-first.”
I know he’s right. Deep down, in the quiet place I rarely visit, I know this friendship is a hollowed-out shell. But cutting it off feels like an amputation. It feels like admitting failure. So I just lean into his chest, letting him hold the weight of it, and say nothing.
A Dial Tone for an Answer
The next day, the hospital calls. It’s Dr. Evans. His voice is gentle, but the words are sharp, clinical. Mom had a fall. She’s stable, but her cognitive function has taken a sharp downturn. It’s time to talk about hospice.
Hospice. The word lands like a stone in my stomach. It’s the final chapter, the beginning of the end. I hang up the phone, my hand trembling. My office suddenly feels too small, the air too thin. I need to talk to someone. I need a friend.
My thumb hovers over Mark’s name, but he’s in a critical all-day meeting with a client. Leo is at school. My sister is on a flight to Japan for work. My finger, moving on its own accord, presses Jessica’s name. Maybe this time will be different. The news is so big, so undeniably serious, that she’ll have to listen. She’ll have to be the friend I remember, the one who held my hand when I got fired from my first job.
She answers on the second ring, her voice breathless and giddy. “You’re not going to believe this. David texted me back!”
The sheer, jarring dissonance of her tone throws me. “Jess…”
“He sent the *perfect* meme. It was one of those ones with the little dog in the burning house saying, ‘This is fine.’ It’s so our sense of humor, you know? I think this is a really good sign. He wants to get drinks on Friday. What should I wear? The black dress, or the red one that makes my boobs look amazing?”
My throat is tight. I can barely get the words out. “Jessica. I have to tell you something. It’s my mom.”
There’s a beat of silence. I can hear her tapping on a keyboard. “Oh, right. How is she?” The question is an afterthought, a piece of conversational lint to be flicked away.
“They’re moving her to hospice.” I say the word and it feels like a confession.
“Oh, honey, that’s… that’s really sad.” Her sympathy sounds canned, like she’s reading from a script. “Listen, I’m so sorry, but I really have to focus on this David thing. My whole future could be riding on this one date. You get it. We’ll totally talk about your mom later, okay? Send her my love or whatever.”
And before I can process the whiplash of “my whole future” and “your mom” and “or whatever,” the line goes dead.
I’m left staring at my reflection in the dark screen of my phone. There’s no anger yet. Just a profound, chilling emptiness. I asked for a lifeline, and she handed me a dial tone.
The Weight of What’s Real
I leave work early, my half-finished spreadsheet a monument to my fractured concentration. I drive straight to the hospital, the city lights blurring into long streaks of color through my tear-filled eyes.
My mother is sleeping when I arrive. Her face, usually so expressive, is slack and pale against the starchy white of the pillowcase. The room smells of antiseptic and fading flowers. A machine beeps a slow, steady rhythm, the only sound in the room.
I pull a chair up to her bedside and just sit, watching the gentle rise and fall of her chest. This is real. The quiet dignity of her breathing, the network of wrinkles around her eyes, the faint scent of the rose-scented lotion I rub on her hands every day. This is a real crisis.
The memory of my phone call with Jessica feels like it belongs to another universe. A universe of trivialities, of manufactured drama and performative emotion. A world where a text message from a man named David holds more weight than a woman’s life fading away.
For twenty years, I’ve made excuses for her. *She’s just going through a tough time. She doesn’t mean it. That’s just how she is.* I’ve carried the burden of our one-sided friendship like a religious duty. Loyalty, I called it. But sitting here, in the stark, quiet reality of this hospital room, it feels a lot more like self-flagellation.
What do you owe a person who takes and takes and never gives? When does a shared history become a shackle? The ethical calculus is dizzying. I’ve invested two decades. To walk away now feels like admitting that my investment was worthless, that I was a fool for twenty years.
But as I take my mother’s frail, cool hand in mine, another thought cuts through the noise. The most valuable thing I have is my time, my energy, my emotional capacity. And I’ve been giving it away, pouring it into a bottomless pit, while the people who truly matter, the ones who give back without a second thought—my husband, my son, my mother—get the dregs.
A quiet anger begins to smolder beneath the grief. It’s not the hot, explosive kind, but a slow, determined burn. The kind that provides light. The kind that can finally show you the way out of a very dark room.
The Unraveling: The Pressure Cooker
The next few weeks are a blur. Mom comes home, our guest room transformed into a hospice suite with a hospital bed and an oxygen tank that hisses like a small, sad dragon. Our house, once a place of noisy, chaotic comfort, is now hushed, organized around medication schedules and the quiet footsteps of the hospice nurse, a kind woman named Clara.
My life shrinks to a series of tightly managed compartments. There’s work, where I stare at my computer screen, my mind a million miles away, pushing through tasks with a grim, robotic efficiency. There’s Leo, whose teenage angst has been replaced by a quiet, watchful concern that breaks my heart. He makes me tea, helps me with Mom, and never once complains that I’ve forgotten to buy his favorite snacks.
And then there’s Mark. My rock. He handles the insurance calls, the pharmacy runs, the late-night talks when the grief and exhaustion threaten to swallow me whole. He’s the scaffolding holding me up, allowing me to focus on the one thing that matters: soaking up these last, precious moments with my mother.
We find a new rhythm. We read her old poetry books aloud. We watch black-and-white movies she loves. I tell her stories about my day, editing out the stress, focusing on the small, funny details. I am living inside a pressure cooker, the heat and intensity building with each passing day. My emotional reserves are at an all-time low, a barren landscape where only the most essential things can survive.
Jessica is not one of them. She has sent a few texts. *Thinking of you! Hope you’re holding up!* They feel like corporate platitudes, HR-approved expressions of sympathy. They require nothing of her and offer nothing to me. I reply with one-word answers. *Thanks. Fine.* I don’t have the energy for anything more. I don’t have the energy for her.
An Emergency of a Different Kind
My phone rings on a Tuesday afternoon. I’m sitting with Mom, trying to coax her to eat a spoonful of soup. The caller ID flashes: JESSICA. My thumb instinctively moves to decline the call, but a lifetime of conditioning is hard to break. I step into the hallway, my voice a low whisper.
“Hi, Jess. I can’t really talk.”
“You have to talk to me,” she says, her voice tight with panic. “It’s an emergency.”
My blood runs cold. An emergency to me now means a siren, a hospital, a final breath. “What is it? What happened?”
“David broke up with me!” she wails, and the sound is so full of genuine, theatrical despair that I’m momentarily stunned. “He said he’s ‘not ready for a commitment.’ After three weeks! Three weeks of my life I will never get back! I feel so used, Maria. He’s a monster. A sociopath.”
I lean my head against the cool drywall of the hallway. The hissing of the oxygen tank is audible from the other room. The absurdity of the situation is a physical force, pressing in on me.
“Jessica,” I say, my voice dangerously calm. “My mother is dying. In the next room. That is an emergency. A man you’ve known for twenty-one days not wanting a second date is… an inconvenience.”
A shocked silence greets my words. It’s the first time in our entire friendship I have ever directly contradicted her narrative of perpetual crisis.
“Wow,” she finally says, her voice dripping with wounded indignation. “I can’t believe you just said that to me. I’m having my heart broken, and you’re minimizing my pain. I thought you, of all people, would understand. I called you because I needed my best friend, and you’re being cold and judgmental.”
The guilt she’s trying to inject finds no purchase. My emotional skin is too raw, too exposed to the real world to be pricked by her manufactured slights.
“I have to go, Jessica.”
“Fine,” she snaps. “I guess I’ll just deal with my devastating heartbreak all by myself. Some friend you are.”
She hangs up. I stand in the hallway for a full minute, the phone still pressed to my ear. It’s not just that she’s self-absorbed. It’s that she’s pathologically incapable of seeing anything outside the narrow confines of her own experience. She demanded I step out of my mother’s deathbed vigil to comfort her over a failed Tinder romance, and when I refused, *I* became the villain. The sheer, breathtaking narcissism of it is finally, horribly, clear.
The Chore
That evening, Leo finds me in the kitchen, aimlessly scrubbing a pot that’s already clean. He’s tall now, almost eye-level with me, and he has a way of looking at me that sees right through the maternal armor I try to wear.
“You look wrecked, Mom,” he says, leaning against the counter.
“It’s a long day, sweetie.”
“Was that Aunt Jessica on the phone earlier?” he asks, his tone casual, but his eyes are sharp.
I nod, not trusting my voice.
“Let me guess,” he says, ticking points off on his fingers. “Something terrible happened with a guy you’ve never met, it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone in the history of the world, and she’s mad at you for not being sufficiently devastated on her behalf.”
The accuracy is so startling it jolts a laugh out of me, a dry, rusty sound. “You’re getting good at this.”
He shrugs, his expression turning serious. “Mom, why are you friends with her?”
It’s the same question Mark asks, but coming from my seventeen-year-old son, it hits differently. It’s not layered with years of marital frustration. It’s just a simple, honest question.
“It’s complicated, Leo. We have a lot of history.”
“So? You have history with that weird plaid couch we had in the basement, but we threw it out when it started to smell weird and the springs were poking through.”
The metaphor is so blunt, so perfectly teenage, and yet so profoundly insightful that I stop scrubbing. I look at my son, this young man who sees the world with such uncluttered clarity.
He softens his tone. “I just see how she makes you feel. After she calls, you’re always… smaller. Quieter. Like she takes up all the air. She’s not your friend, Mom. She’s a chore. She’s the chore you do that never, ever gets done.”
He’s right. That’s exactly what it feels like. An endless, thankless task. I’ve been trying to keep a house clean that someone is actively, constantly, trying to burn down. And for the first time, I don’t defend her. I don’t make excuses. I just nod, and turn back to the sink, seeing my own tired reflection in the bottom of the gleaming pot.
The Fading Light
Two days later, Mom has a good day. A rare gift. She’s lucid, her eyes are clear, and she asks for a cup of real tea, not the thickened liquid we’ve been giving her.
I sit with her by the window, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows across the room. We don’t talk much. We just hold hands and watch the leaves on the maple tree outside sway in the breeze. Her hand in mine is impossibly light, a bundle of delicate bones and paper-thin skin.
“You’re a good daughter, Maria,” she whispers, her voice raspy.
“I try, Mom.”
“No,” she insists, her grip tightening ever so slightly. “You are. You’re… solid. You’re here.”
Her words are simple, but they land with the force of a revelation. *You’re here.* That’s all that matters. Not the grand gestures, not the dramatic declarations of love, but the quiet, constant presence. The shared silence. The steady hand in the fading light.
This is love. This is friendship. It’s the mutual support that buoys you, not the invisible anchor that drowns you.
As the sun dips below the horizon, painting the sky in strokes of orange and purple, I think of Jessica. I picture her in her pristine apartment, scrolling through her phone, stewing in her manufactured misery. She’s probably crafting a narrative in which I’m the callous, unfeeling friend who abandoned her in her time of need.
And I feel nothing. Not anger, not guilt, not even sadness. Just a vast, empty distance. She is a ghost from a life I am rapidly leaving behind, her frantic dramas fading into irrelevance against the profound, heartbreaking, and beautiful reality of what is right here in front of me.
The Final Silence: The Call
It happens on a Friday morning, just before dawn. The house is still and dark, wrapped in the pre-dawn quiet that always feels both peaceful and unsettling. I’m asleep in the armchair next to Mom’s bed, a position I’ve taken to over the last week.
A change in the rhythm of her breathing wakes me. The soft, shallow breaths I’ve grown accustomed to have… stopped. There is only silence. A deep, profound, absolute silence that feels louder than any sound.
My heart hammers against my ribs. I reach out, my hand shaking, and touch her cheek. It’s cool. Too cool.
The next hour is a clinical, surreal ballet. I call the hospice nurse, Clara, my voice a flat, robotic monotone. She arrives, her presence calm and reassuring in the chaos of my emotions. She makes the official pronouncement, her words gentle but final. Time of death: 5:17 AM.
I call Mark, who is out of town on a business trip, a trip he’d almost canceled a dozen times. He answers on the first ring, and all I can say is, “She’s gone,” before my voice breaks. I hear him telling someone he’s leaving immediately, that he’s getting the first flight home.
Then I call my sister. Then my aunt. Each call is a fresh tear in the fabric of my composure. I feel like a switchboard operator for grief, patching people into a tragedy they can’t yet comprehend. Each time I say the words, “Mom passed away this morning,” it becomes a little more real, a little more unbearable. I am numb and shattered all at once.
The Empty Gesture
After the essential calls are made, I sit at the kitchen table, the sun now streaming through the window, mocking the darkness inside me. My phone lies on the table, a sleek black rectangle of obligation. I have to tell Jessica. It feels like a duty, a box to be checked on the checklist of loss.
I can’t bring myself to call her. I can’t listen to her voice, can’t risk her turning this moment, this sacred, awful moment, into a story about herself. So I type out a text, my fingers feeling thick and clumsy.
*Jess, my mom passed away early this morning. Funeral details to follow.*
I hit send and put the phone down, face down, as if it’s radioactive. For ten minutes, there’s nothing. Then, it buzzes. I flip it over.
*OMG babe that is so tragic. I’m so so sorry. In the middle of a nightmare presentation for work. Literally my career is on the line. Can’t talk but sending you all the positive vibes. TTYL.*
I read the message once. Then twice. *Tragic. Nightmare presentation. Positive vibes.* The words are a jumble of meaningless corporate and wellness jargon. It’s a text you send to a coworker you barely know whose cat just died. The casual acronym “TTYL”—Talk To You Later—at the end of a message about my mother’s death is so jarring, so profoundly tone-deaf, it’s almost comical.
There is no offer of help. No, “I’m on my way.” No, “What do you need?” No, “Call me the second you’re free.” Just a quick, dismissive sign-off before she pivots back to the only thing that has ever mattered: herself.
I stare at the text until the words blur. This is it. This is the final piece of evidence in a case that has been building for twenty years. Any lingering flicker of sentiment, any residual memory of the friend she once was, is extinguished. All that’s left is the cold, hard proof of her indifference.
The Gathering Storm
The days leading up to the funeral are a strange mix of profound sadness and suffocating logistics. There are calls to the funeral home, decisions about caskets and flowers, and the surreal task of writing my mother’s obituary. I feel like I’m moving through a thick fog, performing the duties of a person while the real me is still sitting in that silent room.
But I am not alone. The fog is pierced by beacons of genuine care. Mark is a constant, steady presence, handling everything I can’t. Leo orders groceries, fields calls from distant relatives, and makes sure I’m eating. My sister flies in and takes over the eulogy when she finds me staring at a blank page, sobbing.
Friends arrive with casseroles and coffee. They don’t offer empty platitudes; they offer presence. They sit with me in silence, they hug me, they share a funny memory of my mom that makes me laugh through the tears. They do my laundry. They walk my dog. They show up.
Jessica does not.
She sends another text two days later. *Hey! Hope you’re doing ok. The funeral is Sun at 2, right? I MIGHT be able to make it but this weekend is crazy. David wants to have a ‘talk’ and I think he might want to get back together. It’s all very dramatic.*
I don’t reply. The idea of her presence at the funeral now feels like a violation. A performance. She would be there not to honor my mother, but to be seen, to collect sympathy points, to find a dramatic backdrop for her own never-ending soap opera.
Her casual disregard is no longer a papercut. It’s a gaping wound. The anger I felt in the hospital, the slow burn, is now a gathering storm. The pressure is building, the air growing thick and heavy. I can feel the lightning crackling just beneath the surface of my grief.
The Eve of the Wake
The night before the wake, our house is quiet again. The last of the relatives has gone to their hotel. Leo is asleep upstairs. Mark and I are sitting on the couch in the dark, a single lamp casting a soft glow on the living room. It’s clean, too clean, tidied and prepared for the onslaught of guests tomorrow.
There are photos of my mom on the mantle, a collection of moments from a life well-lived. Her laughing on a beach, holding me as a baby, beaming at her wedding. My grief is a physical thing, a heavy blanket I can’t shrug off.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?” Mark asks softly, his arm around my shoulders.
“No,” I say honestly. “I don’t want to see all those people. I don’t want to hear ‘I’m so sorry for your loss’ a hundred times. I just want my mom back.”
“I know.” He holds me tighter. “We’ll get through it. Together.”
Just then, my phone lights up on the coffee table. A text from Jessica.
*Crisis averted! David and I are back on. Phew! So I can def make it tomorrow. See you there. I’ll need a big hug! XOXO*
I stare at the screen, and something inside me hardens into a diamond-sharp point. The casual flippancy, the triumphant announcement of her romantic reconciliation as a lead-in to my mother’s wake, the demand for *her* hug. It’s all so perfectly, monstrously her.
She is going to walk into my home, a home steeped in mourning for the most significant woman in my life, and she is going to make it about her. I know it as surely as I know my own name.
“What is it?” Mark asks, seeing the look on my face.
“It’s Jessica,” I say, my voice devoid of emotion. “She’s coming tomorrow.”
He tenses. “Do you want me to tell her not to?”
I think about it for a moment. I could. I could send a text, create a drama, have a fight. But that’s her game. That’s her territory.
“No,” I say, a strange, cold calm settling over me. “Let her come.”
Let her walk into the storm.
The Reckoning: The Murmur of Grief
The house is full. Not with noise, but with presence. People move with a quiet reverence, their voices low, a gentle murmur of shared sorrow and fond remembrance. Friends from my mom’s book club are gathered by the fireplace, talking about her favorite authors. Cousins I haven’t seen in years stand in the kitchen, sharing childhood stories.
I drift through the rooms like a ghost, accepting hugs that feel both comforting and distant. I am the host of a party I never wanted to throw. Mark stays close, a silent guardian, refilling my glass of water, touching my back, anchoring me to the present moment when the waves of grief threaten to pull me under. Leo is a mirror of his father, a solemn, handsome young man shaking hands and accepting condolences with a grace that fills me with a fierce, painful pride.
Every handshake, every whispered, “She was a wonderful woman,” chips away at my emotional armor. I am raw, exposed. The air is thick with the scent of lilies and baked ham, a bizarre combination of death and life.
I am standing by the mantelpiece, looking at a photo of my mom and me at my college graduation, when the front door opens. The murmur of the room doesn’t change, but a new energy enters with the person who has just arrived. I don’t have to look. I can feel it.
The Wrong Kind of Black
Jessica sweeps in an hour late.
She’s not wearing mourning clothes. She’s in a tight black dress, the kind you wear to a cocktail party, not a wake. It has a tasteful but noticeable slit up the thigh. Her heels click loudly on the hardwood floors, a sharp, intrusive sound that cuts through the soft hum of conversation. Her makeup is perfect, her hair styled in loose, glamorous waves. She looks like she’s on her way to a hot date, and my mother’s wake is simply a brief stop along the way.
Heads turn. The quiet conversations falter for a moment as she makes her way toward me, a look of performative sadness carefully arranged on her face.
She pulls me into a hug, her expensive perfume overwhelming the scent of the lilies. It’s a brief, stiff embrace, her hands patting my back with the impersonal rhythm of a metronome. She pulls away, holding me by the shoulders, her eyes scanning my face.
“Oh, honey, you look exhausted,” she says, her voice a stage whisper. “I am so, so sorry for your loss.”
Then, her tone shifts. The mask of sympathy drops, replaced by an urgent, conspiratorial glint in her eyes. She leans in closer, pulling me away from the mantelpiece and the photos of my mother.
“Listen,” she says, her voice dropping even lower. “I really need to talk to you. You are not going to BELIEVE what happened with David. He had the nerve to try and make plans with his friends this Friday, after we *just* got back together. It’s like, does he not understand the concept of a reunion tour? I need your advice. You’re so good at this stuff. What should I do?”
I just stare at her. The world around me seems to fall away. The murmuring voices, the scent of the flowers, the warmth of the room—it all vanishes. There is only Jessica’s perfectly made-up face, her brow furrowed with the manufactured crisis of a man who wants to see his friends.
We are standing in my living room, surrounded by people who loved my mother. My mother, who is lying in a casket at a funeral home a few miles away. And Jessica is asking me for tactical dating advice.
The grief that has been a heavy blanket for days is suddenly gone. In its place, something else rises. It’s not hot, fiery anger. It’s cold. It’s a white-hot, clarifying rage that burns away all the fog, all the excuses, all the history. It’s an ice storm in my veins.
“Jessica,” I say, my voice numb. “My mother just died. I can’t do this right now.”
She actually huffs, a little puff of air that is pure, undiluted annoyance. Her face, for a split second, shows genuine irritation, as if I’ve committed a grave social faux pas.
“Wow, Maria,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief. “I know you’re sad, but you don’t have to be so selfish. I’m having a real crisis here, and I came all this way to talk to my best friend.”
Selfish.
The word hangs in the air between us, a perfect, glittering monument to her own delusion. She called me selfish. In my home. At my mother’s wake. My grief, my loss, my family’s pain—it’s all just an inconvenient obstacle to what she really wants. An audience.
And in that moment, twenty years of loyalty, of obligation, of being the good friend, shatters into a million pieces.
The Public Exorcism
I don’t raise my voice. I don’t cry. I don’t even blink. A chilling, absolute calm descends upon me. It isn’t just anger. It is… an exorcism.
I look her dead in the eye.
“You’re right, Jessica,” I say, my voice clear and steady, cutting through the quiet murmur of the room. “Let’s talk about your crisis. Loudly. So everyone can weigh in.”
I turn my body, breaking our private huddle to face the other guests. I raise my voice just enough to command the attention of the entire living room.
“Everyone!”
The conversations stop instantly. Every head in the room swivels toward us. The silence is sudden and total.
“Everyone! I’d like your attention, please. Jessica is having a very important crisis.” I gesture toward her with a calm, deliberate hand. “It seems David from Tinder won’t text her back. This is, as you can imagine, far more pressing than my mother’s death. So please, let’s all put our grief on hold and give Jessica the attention she so clearly deserves.”
A mortified, breathless silence falls over the room. You could hear a tear drop. Everyone—my sister, my cousins, my boss, my mother’s oldest friends—is staring at Jessica. Her face, which was twisted in indignation a moment ago, cycles through a rapid series of emotions: confusion, then dawning comprehension, then a blossoming, horrified shame. The color drains from her cheeks, leaving two bright spots of rouge standing out like warning lights.
She is exposed. Her profound, staggering selfishness, which I had privately absorbed for two decades, is now laid bare for our entire social circle to witness. There is no excuse she can offer, no way to spin this. She is standing in a room of mourners, having been publicly identified ‘ the emotional parasite she is.
She opens her mouth, stammers something that sounds like “I… Maria… I didn’t…,” but the words die in her throat. Her eyes dart around the room, finding no sympathy, only stunned, judgmental silence.
She turns and practically flees, her cocktail heels clattering a panicked retreat across the floor. The front door opens and clicks shut behind her, the sound as final as a gavel.
The Liberating Quiet
The silence she leaves behind is different. It’s not heavy or awkward. It’s clean. It’s the quiet after a storm has passed, washing the air of all its pressure.
My sister is the first to move. She comes to my side, her eyes wide with a mixture of shock and awe. She puts her arm around me, and it’s an anchor of pure, unconditional support. Mark is on my other side in an instant, his hand finding mine.
“I’m so sorry you all had to see that,” I say to the room, my voice still steady.
My mother’s best friend, a woman named Eleanor, steps forward. She has tears in her eyes, but she’s smiling. “Don’t you dare apologize, Maria,” she says, her voice firm. “Your mother would have been so proud of you.”
A few people chuckle. The tension breaks. The murmur of conversation slowly resumes, but the tone has shifted. It’s warmer, more intimate. It feels like a circle of wagons has been drawn around me.
I look at the faces of the people in my living room—the family, the true friends, the ones who brought food, the ones who sat with me in silence, the ones who showed up. I feel a wave of gratitude so powerful it almost brings me to my knees.
I pull my phone from my pocket, my fingers moving with a purpose I haven’t felt in years. I find her name in my contacts. Jessica. For two decades, that name has meant obligation, exhaustion, a slow-leaking drain on my soul.
I press the screen.
*Block this contact.*
Then, I go one step further. I hold my finger down on her name until a small menu appears.
*Delete contact.*
I press it without a moment’s hesitation. The name vanishes from my phone, and with it, the weight of a twenty-year mistake.
The front door hasn’t even been closed for a full minute, but she is already gone from my life. A toxic limb, amputated cleanly and for good. And I am left standing here, surrounded by the people who actually care, finally able to mourn my mother in peace. I take a deep, clean breath, the first one that feels like it has reached the bottom of my lungs in a very, very long time
About the Author
