Creative Writing: A Parent's Funeral

The funeral was supposed to be a family affair.
She had not wanted to invite so many people, most of them strangers to her, to be there at the moment she said goodbye. Yet, she was not the only person who had a right to his last moments above the earth, it seemed. Everyone, from the family who knew nothing of the anguish he had suffered in his last years, to the colleagues who saw him every day but hadn’t actually seen him, to the long-lost friends and passing acquaintances who were surprised to find that he was married, let alone dead, wanted to have a last chance to gaze upon him in his open coffin and say goodbye.
She stayed seated at the front most pew where she had the best view of all the people who walked past. Some, she saw, stared

She held a delicate black lace handkerchief to her nose, and the other wore a black veil that revealed as much as it concealed, allowing glimpses of blood red lipstick on shapely lips to be seen. “You should keep an eye on your son.”
“It’s a pity… but this is what comes from diving in too deep,” someone else said a few rows behind with a soft click of their tongue. “Someone should have stopped him before it was too late.”
She closed her eyes slowly, tuning the harpies out. When she opened them, she gazed up at the ceiling, tracing the high, arcing beams that came together in a beautiful golden rosette. The church her mother-in-law had chosen for her departed son’s service was an old one, with timber walls, huge, multi-paneled stained-glass windows and enough golden gild that put together, could probably rival the weight of the Charging Bull on Wall Street.
If she recalled correctly, this very church had been used as a template for the Church of Lost Souls, the regeneration site that all players who ventured into Elysia eventually ended up

Someone kind had dropped off his belongings from the office on one of the days following his funeral. There was not much since his work had been mostly digital. In fact, there was so little that it all fit into a single cardboard cube.
When Sera gave up the apartment, took a leave of absence from work and moved out of the city, the cube had simply been bundled up with all the other boxes that the movers had packed and transported for her. For one long month, it lay untouched in the spare room of the cottage she had moved to until she stumbled across it again on a day that seemed bright and sunny and full of potential.
The cube was such a generic one, she thought at first that it simply contained more paraphernalia she had yet to unpack. She dug into it without caution, wondering which long-lost moth-eaten sweater might surface this time, or whether this was where her lost baking tin had disappeared to. The last thing she expected to find was Gilbert’s neuronode, wrapped in the dark green fleece jacket he had absconded to his office when she’d threatened to throw it out on account of it being the sort of green that reminded one of alfalfa laden horse poop. After all, she’d already assigned his things to a storage facility, in an effort to ‘move