On the way to the wake, all the cars were caked in salt, or damp with salty spray from the highway.  My eyes itch from all the half-born tears that dry up before they flow.  This isn't real crying though, not like your mother was crying, her face just dripping tears, while smiling and trying to greet people in that crazy time we call a wake. 

Awake.  I never am usually.  I can't fault anyone for giving into fear and hiding, whether with drugs, or booze, or like I do--by just hiding in plain sight.  Sometimes I think, if I were a more honest man, I would have been a drunk, I would have been more overt, more sincere, and less self-conscious in my hiding.  I think the bleary-eyed drunk, who can't focus his eyes on me, who comes falling down to the detox where I work knows himself better than I know myself, and accepts himself, in a way.  He has a disease.  What is my excuse? 

It was only twenty miles out of the city, but the stars were overwhelming.  The Big Dipper was right there.  So was Orion and his 'sword.'  (I never thought of it as a sword, but let me not doubt the wisdom of legend.)  It seemed like the whole universe was watching, and well it may have been because it was a huge gathering of broken hearts. 

The name they give to such a gathering is 'wake'.  Some say the name is from the Irish tradition in times before physicians were readily available to pronounce death definitively.  The body would be dressed for burial, laid out on the family's dining room table, and loved one's would gather and wait to make certain the body did not 'wake'; apparently some ancients who fell unconscious had been inadvertantly buried alive.  No doubt there is some truth to this version, since most cultures have conducted, since ancient times, similar gatherings after death and before burial.  But there is a deeper need, common to all humans, and more immediate to the heart; a need for community in time of crisis. 

In so-called simpler times, it may have been easier to say the purpose of our gathering was to wait with our friends for their loved one to wake.  And the other purpose, unstated as if secondary, would be having the great benefit of sustaining friends close-by when, inevitably, grief would quake their souls.  In a time when oceans were crossed in months, not hours, when nations knew little of each other, and knew even less about the wildernesses that lay between them, in a time when boundaries of every sort were more significant—and better tended—than today, it seems likely that the real purpose for a wake would remain unstated, and that a plausible excuse would be provided for those who required a crass explanation. 

We gather in the wake of another's life to acknowledge death, to face it down, to confront it while we may, alive, and together as a community.  For one day it will come for each of us individually.  In the wake of another's life, we gather to honor that life, and to express respect, for we know that each life endures injuries that will never be known, suffers injustices that will never be righted, and sustains losses for which there can be no compensation.  We bring at each life's end some semblance of our recognition that life is more than all of us.  And we stand, side by side, weeping with those we love, to be counted as among the living, and by defiantly embracing this agony to claim our place as one still participating in life. 

You must now endure overwhelming pain, and that terrifies me.  But no matter how dark it gets, or how deadly quiet or cold that darkness becomes, I will break that silence, and I will warm that vastness with a tiny trembling candle flame. 

Here I am.  You are not alone.