My appendix burst at 2:14 in the morning on a Tuesday in December. I know the exact time because I looked at my phone before I dialed. Looked at it and noted the number the way you note a detail when some part of your brain understands that this moment might become the last moment you have to observe anything at all.

I called my parents seventeen times. My mother texted back on the fourth attempt: Your sister’s baby shower is tomorrow. We can’t leave now.

After that, nothing. I was twenty-six years old, alone on the floor of my apartment, and the person who was supposed to be my mother had just confirmed what some part of me had always known — that I was, in the deepest and most fundamental way, an afterthought. A complication.

A problem to be addressed when more important things had been attended to. I called an ambulance myself. Gave them my address in the flat, precise voice of someone doing the only thing left to do.

Then I lay on the cold floor and waited and tried to breathe through pain that had moved past the point where breathing helped. I died on the operating table. Briefly, technically, measurably — the kind of death that gets words like cardiac event attached to it in medical records.