A thin man in a black robe spoke from a small podium. He wore thin, wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down his nose as he spoke. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The man removed his glasses and folded them, holding them before him in his folded hands. “I always have trouble at memorial services,” the man said. “On one hand, I have my faith, which has guided me through some of the darkest periods of my life, which has seen me through to brighter skies.

“But the thing we often forget about faith is that it is not universal. I may stand up here and tell you what I believe, but for me to presume that my beliefs have any bearing on yours would be unhelpful. The fact is that we are all very different. All of us here today believe different things. Our beliefs divide us more deeply than any other facet of our multi-faceted lives. But it is days like today that I am reminded that there is so much more to us as a people than that which divides us. It is something that I often wish that I could carry with me, but epiphanies and aphorisms are often forgotten and taken for granted. Days like this, tragedies like this, when the full magnitude of the uncertainty of this world is thrown into sharp relief for us all to see, those lessons come back. Often, we feel ashamed. I do. Ashamed to learn that the wisdom we thought we had, wisdom for which we have fought and struggled, through those dark passages of our own life, is but a phantom, an empty signifier. A semantically empty sentiment. But life is punctuated across its line by instances that again show us that what we have is fleeting and tenuous and easily disrupted.

“The thread that holds us to life is delicate as any spider’s web, but it is precisely that fragility that renders our experience so meaningful. The fact that, for any of us, the end can never for certain be placed more than an eye-bat away from where we are now. It’s a cliché to say that the future is not certain for any of us. I knew some of the people who will be laid to rest here today, most of them I did not. I have no idea what they were like, what their dreams were, what they were to their families. But in this gathered group today we have the apotheosis of those lives—we have within our collective hearts memories and impressions, and it is within us that these people, our loved ones, taken from us unexpectedly, will live on. And in that thought I find comfort. Because even though we all must die, none of us can ever cease to exist. The work we do in this world, the people to whom we connect, the physical and emotional bonds that we forge in this fleeting collection of moments on this earth are what will link us to it for the duration of eternity. We lay sixteen people in the ground today. All of them will be missed. Because there is a piece of the world that has been vacated—an absence in space.

“But in our hearts, and in our minds, those people will never perish, will never fade, will never vanish into the fogs of history, because we hold them close to our hearts, and close to our hearts it is warm, and it is safe, and it is there at that they will find their final rest. Regardless of what you believe happens to the soul after its final voyage, or even if you believe in a soul at all—all of this is not important on this day. Let the dead have their experiences, and let us instead focus on our own. Because we carry these people in our hearts through the duration of our remaining time on this earth. And let us strive, with all of the conviction that we can muster at this trying hour of our day, to remember this feeling, remember how it felt to experience the icy wind at the razor’s edge, to gaze into the abyss at the very end of life. And let us step back with the knowledge that none of us knows the precise time when we will finally walk over that precipice. But let us walk our remaining steps on this earth, however many they may be, working to secure our place in the hearts of the ones we love. Because that is the immortality of gods and titans. That is the only universal endurance of the soul.”

-from the new book

“Mommy is he gonna eat the wafer?”

“Yes, sweetie, he is.”

Pause.

“Is it a banilla wafer?”

-Overheard at a Catholic funeral, during the Eucharist