I’ve had dreams like this. Dreams in which Sandra was alive and I realised halfway through that hey, shouldn’t you be dead? Never quite sure which ones were worse: those, or the ones in which I only noticed after waking up. The dreams itself weren’t bad, just the same mix of anxiety dream and vague memories of living together in a house we’ve only lived in in dreams. It’s just the realisation that this is not real that hurts. No surprise than that this page from chapter 67 of Kuzushiro’s Ani no Yome to Kurashite Imasu / Living with my Brother’s Wife hit me raw.
Kishibe Shino is a seventeen year old girl whose married brother died six months ago, leaving her as well as his wife and her sister-in-law Nozomi behind. She has no other family, her parents having died when she was much younger. Therefore she’s living together with her sister-in-law, determined to not be a burden to her, while she is equally determined to be a shoulder Shino can lean on to. Most of the series is Shino and Nozomi learning to live together as a family when all they had in common was the person they’re both still mourning. Grief is an understated, but continuous presence in the story and around chapter 67, from which this is taken, the story has progressed towards the one year anniversary of his death. And because most of the story is centered around two awkward people learning to form a family together, with their grief in the background, chapters like this that center it, hit that much harder.