You spend forty years perfecting a specific gait, a specific way of tilting your head when Mrs. Higgins complains about the choir director. You know that feeling when the stage lights finally go out and you’re just standing there in the dark? The funeral was a MASTERPIECE of suburban theater. Everyone in their Sunday best, the lawn perfectly manicured, the neighbors nodding in that practiced, rhythmic sympathy. But then the visitors leave. They always leave. Every single one of them leaves. And you're left in a house that smells faintly of lilies and lemon pledge, realizing the audience has gone home and the theater is actually just a tomb. You sit in the leather wingback chair—the one she bought for your retirement—and you prepare to perform the ritual. It’s a biological imperative at this point, like blinking or swallowing. You close your eyes to address the Almighty. But when you open your mouth, or try to form the internal monologue, you find a complete lack of physiological response. It’s a dead circuit. A total systems failure. You’ve spent decades leading the liturgy, being the "pillar" of the community, but alone in the quiet, you realize the transmission is flatlining. There is no signal. NO SIGNAL AT ALL. It’s almost funny, isn’t it? To spend half a century talking to the ceiling and only now realize it’s just drywall and plaster. I’ve analyzed the data. The symptoms are consistent with a localized existential collapse. When you lose the person who acted as your primary witness, the spiritual infrastructure simply... dissolves. It’s a structural issue.