When I first took Stephanie’s parents to the cemetery, to buy a grave for their daughter, her mother stood in the road and pointed to a statue of The Risen Christ. “I want her over there,” she said, “at the right hand of Jesus.” We walked across the section to an empty, unmarked space underneath the outstretched granite right arm of Christ. “Here,” Stephanie’s mother said, her wet eyes cast upward into the gray eyes of Christ. Stephanie’s father, his eyes growing narrow, was reading the name on the neighboring grave. FOSTER is what it read. It was cut in stone.

Lynch, Thomas, The undertaking-life studie…, loc. 214