Reasons comic 48 is late:
Betty died.
I'm having panic attacks.
I have to give a speech tomorrow at 8:00 a.m.
I am very tired.

I drew and scripted it all, I just can't stay up and color it tonight. I put up one of the sketches as filler until later today. It should be up soon, probably along with a huge addition to this post.

UPDATE:
Okay, comic 48 is up. Now I'm going to get all of these dark accounts out of the way in a single post.

My family just got home from Betty's funeral. I couldn't attend because of various tests and things. When everyone got back, my father and aunt described the service to me:

It was held in Satanta (pronounced Suh-tan-uh, not Satan-tah), a tiny town in Kansas that Betty grew up in. By tiny, I mean that there are about 18 streets in the whole town. And the county its in is apparently the flattest in flat Kansas. Harvest is over, so several fields are nothing but dust.
You can see the blue tent they erected from half a mile away. The cemetery is full of relatives: Deckers and Hales. Twenty relatives--aunts, uncles, and siblings--sit in folding chairs covered in crushed blue velvet. Four singers stand behind. They wait for the service to start. There is no sound but the wind blowing across the plains. The edges of the tent and people's hair streams out before them.
Half a mile away is a set of train tracks. The train blows its horn as it crosses one of the 18 roads. Only in this flatland, the sound of the horn is rendered into a kind of musical tone. The pitch is clear and trumpet-like. It resonates slowly over the open space. Four times it sounds, without hurry.
And then, they begin to sing.
There is silver ornamentation on the silver-painted casket. Three metal plates hold the bars on each side. My father looks at the casket, and then notices that those plates are reflecting the faces of Ken, Lori, and my mother. One face in each of the metal plates. Betty's three children, eerily reflected on her casket.
It was absolutely surreal. The hair stood up on the back of your neck.
Afterwards, someone showed my family a picture of Betty from right around the time she graduated highschool. She was standing next to a house, and behind that was that flat, featureless Kansas horizon. It could just has easily been Mars. And as everyone left, the singers began one last, upbeat tune. "Sing and Be Happy". It had always been one of her favorites. Anywhere else, it would have been somehow gruesomely cheerful. But here, and only here, it was wonderful.

That's how my father told it, anyway. The only personal account I can give you was the one I wrote in my scratchbook after the viewing. Warning, it doesn't make much sense. Its one of those wee hour ramblings:

"O Death, I stand before you know like a child uncomprehending. Such long years you have held this daughter without fully embracing her. So long she walked this line of wavering mind without your kiss. Lying there, my eyes deceive themselves at her stillness. So accustomed to the subtle motions of life that, as I watch her, her chest still rises, her eyes still move beneath the glued and painted lids. Such cavernous nostrils, such broad, straight lips, unbelievably frozen before me.
"How long have I anticipated this day? How long has the leaking of her essence has plagued these homes? If only all the soul that leaked for so many years could have been regathered, the strands rebraided, like a chain of memories to bind up her brain once again and remove the vacancy of her remembered gaze...
"And yet, I stand before her still, letting my eyes take in the stillness of her bones. My eyes stop playing tricks, and I can see her chest isn't really rising, her skin isn't twitching. She is dead. She is dead. She is dead and I live on.
"Funerals impress me with their scope. Those phrases float over us: "She looks really good" and "She's finally at peace". But mostly these people talk of other things, almost ANY other thing, rather than mortality. It is as if we want to look away, but cannot. We want to affirm our lives in the midst of death. And when we try to look, we do not see.
"O Death, we stand before you as your children, uncomprehending. And still you grant us mercy, even while we are still living. You take one alone, and give the rest of us the power to grieve.
"Rest peacefully, grandmother."

And, finally, a poem from The Sandman series:

Death is before me today:
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden after sickness
Death is before me today:
Like the odor of myrrh,
Like sitting under a sail in a good wind.
Death is before me today:
Like the course of a stream
Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.
Death is before me today:
Like the home that a man longs to see,
After years spent as a captive.

Sunday is Halloween, everyone. Take time to honor your dead. ^_^
  ¶ 20:46