There is a seat at their table that used to be yours.
Now you sit through the holidays performing a smaller, quieter version of yourself so nobody makes it strange. The family is still alive. You lost them anyway, to the gap between who you have become and who they need you to be.
And nobody lets you grieve it. There is no funeral for this. No casserole, no card, no one saying they are sorry for your loss, because the people are still walking around and you are supposed to act as though nothing died. So the grief has nowhere to go, and grief with nowhere to go does not leave. It sits at every holiday. It sits in the empty chair.
You have tried to fix it. The therapy. The boundary books. The careful conversation you rehearsed in the shower before you said it. Going quiet for a while to protect yourself, then the guilt walking you right back. Telling yourself to just be grateful for the version of them you can still have.
None of it moved the ache, and you did not do any of it wrong. Every one of those was aimed at managing them, or mending it, or bracing for the next disappointment. Not one of them let you mourn. You cannot heal what you have not been allowed to bury.
So bury it.
A Funeral for the Living is a small rite you hold at your own kitchen table, for the relationship as it was supposed to be. You write the eulogy for what actually died. You bury the grief, and you keep the love, because the love was never the thing that had to go. You draw a line in salt at the size you refuse to shrink below. I wrote it. You cast it.
It asks for nothing you do not already have. A candle, a pinch of salt, rosemary from the spice rack, a slip of paper. It stays entirely in your hands and your grief and never reaches toward them to change them, because that was never your work to do. What you walk away with is the one thing this grief has never had: an ending place. A funeral you finally got to hold.