There were not many around to attend, the chapel was barely half-full. In front of the altar lay two coffins, identical, and within the coffins lay two men, identical. One stepped up to deliver a short eulogy, the only one left of the three of them. Her husband and her children sat in the front pews, a reminder that there was life beyond this death. The children were far too young to understand the horror behind this loss and their innocence was a comfort to her.
And yet, she knew with certainty that the irrevocable, irreversible fact that her brothers were dead would never cease to haunt her for as long as she lived. Of her own family she was the lone person who had not succumbed to death. The guilt of survivorship had placed on her an even greater resolve to see to it that the rest of her family, the one she had created for herself with Arthur, would live to old age in ripe and fulfilling lives.
"The thing I remember most fondly of my brothers was the way they could make any person laugh. It was not a laughter borne from cruelty, at the expense of cheap jokes or ill-hatched pranks. It was a laughter that came from kindness, from an unfailing ability to brighten anyone's day. They had hearts overflowing with generosity and they were always willing to show love even to those whose intent was to hurt them. We mourn, not because life was snatched away from them at so young an age, but for the fact that the rest of us are now denied the opportunity to be made whole from their goodness. I know that some of those who so brutally murdered them are still out there, and it is to them that I say that though my brothers are dead, death shall have no dominion over them, for angels such as these never truly leave our side."