I hadn’t gone to the cemetery on Christmas Eve, and it was eating me alive. I kept postponing to the next day and the next day. It was raining. No fresh-cut lilies. No great urgency because he was dead. But I kept getting this feeling like he’d been expecting me at that particular time and place. (I always visit on Christmas Eve. It’s been our thing since he died.) So I made this tentative plan in my head to show up on New Year’s Eve.

But that day I worked late and we were due at a family dinner party. Our schedule kept getting tighter and tighter. Plus we’d had a literal thunderstorm with literal lightning. So that meant soggy graves, umbrellas, a wet and whiny daughter, tracking mud through the party, etc. I was about to postpone again when I looked out my office window and saw a double fucking rainbow. I’d known I was late, but I hadn’t realized I was double-rainbow late. I promptly shut down my work computer and got everyone in the car.

The sky was blue now. The rainbows were fading at my back, having done their job with the light. I chose tulips at the store because my mom had told me they keep growing after they’re cut.

At the cemetery, Matt said he’d stay in the car so my daughter and I could “have a moment.” He was enjoying a new tin of snack mix at the time. My sweet girl came with me to the grave, wrapped her arm around my waist for a cuddle, then let go to do the flowers. I heard the car window unroll outside the cemetery wall. “Hug her again!” Matt shouted at our daughter, pointing his phone at us from the idling car. She dutifully hugged me again for the camera.

When I was online later that night, the double rainbow was all over my local feeds, and I realized that I hadn’t thought to take a picture. Matt hadn’t either, even though he’s a photographer and we’d marveled together about how loud the colors were. But at the cemetery he’d insisted on capturing the small arc of our daughter’s arm, and the sun bouncing off our hair, as if to prove that we’d gotten the memo from above. Now I’ll always have an image of that feeling that we’re still living parallel to the dead, that the dead still know how to summon us to their sides, even though it may just be a trick of the light.