Once, when I was in college: the class session before we were to take a test in poly sci, our instructor told us he didn’t want to hear about any dead grandparents, meaning he didn’t want to get calls from any of us making fake excuses to postpone taking the test. The night before the test, while I was studying for it, I got a call from my parents who told me that my grandfather had died. I was upset, of course (I remember crying and my roommates trying to comfort me and me wanting them to just stay away from me—I wasn’t particularly close with any of them, and their efforts felt like an invasion of my privacy), but I did manage to get back to studying after a while and took the test the next day. I was so tempted to tell the instructor that my grandfather actually did die and that he might want to reconsider making glib remarks like that, but I refrained.