Latest Blog Post

Day 55 Year 140 - Chelsea's Sudden Departure (1)

Chelsea Rose hadn’t planned to die, not exactly. Not like this. She’d insisted, right up to the end, that she was fine. Shrugged off the fatigue, the shortness of breath, the weight loss. “I’m old, not dead,” she said with a familiar scoff, daring someone to argue. Even when Maddi and Natalia tried to gently push her to rest, she refused to acknowledge the inevitable.

When the call came that morning, it came to Amelia. She didn’t speak for a full minute. Just listened, a hand over her mouth, the color draining from her face. Her aunts were quickly by her side, already knowing, already bracing for the news they’d been afraid of for months. Now, as they gathered in Amelia and Hunter’s apartment, the living room felt too big, too clean, the air heavy with the kind of silence that follows shock.

Chelsea was gone. ​Quietly. Alone.
​Exactly the opposite of the way she’d come into the world.
Just the way she’d always warned them she would.

“She said she was fine,” Madalynne murmured, more to herself than to anyone else.

“We both knew she wasn’t,” Natalia said softly.

Realizing that her mother had kept this secret from her, and wondering how long she had done so, Amelia said hollowly from across the room, “She didn’t want pity.”

Chelsea had raised her with a sharp edge. A misplaced Manhattanite in Nashville. She’d attended every school function with quips that could outwit the sharpest Southern sarcasm. She was never sappy, but Amelia never doubted her love. Never questioned how much she was wanted, how much she was doted upon. How quickly Chelsea would have gone to bat for her.

Dahlia sat curled on the corner of the couch, arms wrapped tightly around her knees. She’d only known her grandmother in her older years, though she was just as sharp, funny, and always a little too honest as she had been her whole life. She was the only adult who had ever told her, completely serious, “Don’t be polite when you don’t have to. That’s how they get ya.”