Everyone was standing around the living room, silently eating cake from paper plates. A room crammed full of people that I didn’t know were memorializing a woman I barely knew, the wife of my husband’s co-worker who’d died of cancer. I squeezed onto the crowded leather couch, and watched a continuous loop of photos of the deceased -- with her husband, with her friends, with her kids -- accompanied by maudlin music on a laptop. The pain in the room was palpable, and I wanted to run out the door.