Her hair had not been cut in months, and she knew the funeral might be any day, so she took an afternoon off and went to the salon. “I saw a meme the other day,” her hairstylist said, concentrating hard on the back of her head. “It was about how cowlicks are formed, and it showed a cow coming into a kid’s room at night and actually licking his hair, and that’s how it happens.”

A tear slipped from her eye in the mirror. She recalled the text thread she had going with her brother, where he just sent her minor variations of the “guess I’ll die” meme, which to be honest she had never fully understood. “Oh God, did I snip you?” her stylist asked, bending down under a curtain of benevolent hair.

“No, no,” she said, laying her hand on the stylist’s arm, feeling that new and unstoppable stream of care pour out of her palm. “I was just thinking that you and I . . . have seen very different memes in our lives.”