The music cut off.

“Call an ambulance!” a woman shouted.

I was already on my knees beside him. My dress spread around me as I grabbed his face with both hands.

“Karl? Karl, look at me.”

His eyes were closed.

I remember people crowding in, then pulling back, then pressing in again.

I remember the paramedics arriving, kneeling over him, saying words like “clear,” and “again,” and “no response.”

Finally, one of them looked up at me and said the words that shattered me.

“It appears to be cardiac arrest.”

They took him away, and I stood in the middle of the dance floor in my wedding dress, staring at the doors long after the stretcher disappeared.

Tears ran down my face.

Someone wrapped a coat around my shoulders, but I barely felt it.

Karl was gone, and a life without him felt impossible.

A doctor later confirmed what the paramedic had suspected. Karl had died of a heart attack.

Four days later, I buried him.

I handled everything because there was no one else to do it.

The only family contact I found in his phone was a cousin named Daniel. He came to the funeral, but no one else from Karl’s family showed up.

He stood off to the side after the service, hands in his coat pockets, looking like someone who wanted to leave but knew it would look wrong.

I walked over to him, grief having burned away any softness in me.

“You’re Karl’s cousin, right?”

He nodded. “Daniel.”