Chapter 100: To say goodbye

LEO

Nate had planned his own funeral. Quinn told me that he'd actually had parts of it figured out since high school. That didn't surprise me. Nate had said once that he'd always known his life expectancy wasn't very long, and death had hovered near him time and again as we all grew up.

We gathered in the church his family had attended for years on a cold afternoon in mid-January. I sat in a pew with my parents, my brothers Simon and Danny, and Simon's girlfriend Justine, two rows behind the front pew where Quinn and Carrie had joined Mark and Sheri. The church wasn't even near full, and I couldn't help comparing the turnout here with that at Matt's service last year. That day, the church had been so full, they'd had to stream the service outside to the people who couldn't get in, and his grandparents' house had been crowded afterward for the repast. It made me unreasonably angry; Nate had fought with everything he had to hold onto life, and Matt had thrown his away with both hands.