prolouge
"I'm an old woman now, I can't do nothing." Juliette's grandmother sighed, taking the teary-eyed girls hand. "Young folks don't pay me no mind. But in my day, I sure was something, before I felt the heavy hand of time."
Juliette couldn't breath. Her throat was clogged with a melting pot of emotions and her lungs were slowly filling with her own aqueous despair. She wasn't even the one dying, she tried to reason with herself. Her grandmother had already come to accept she would pass on, so why couldn't Juliette?
"Darling," grandmother Vos said, her voice weak but her will strong enough to hold on in her last few minutes. "When I reach the other side, I will be able to waste away the sunsets and see where rainbows never die. I will be where you will end and when you get there, I will be waiting with a glass of apple juice in one hand and your grandfather Bob in the other."
Juliette still couldn't speak, she only nodded rapidly and pressed her lips tight together, too afraid to let them open and release the flow of sobs already raking her body. She couldn't help but watch in horror as her grandmother passed on, leaving her with only the memory that would eventually dim and become tainted with whatever life would throw at her down the line.
With a final soul-crushing sob and the comfort she found so rarely in her mother's arms, she closed her own eyes and imagine where her grandmother would go. The place where rainbows never die.