Here’s to your uncle, and his family, and their friends, and the neighbors, and the clean air and the time to breathe them all in.

It’s partly for contrast like this that my wife and I go up to the foothills every year or so. Sometimes losing the anonymity of the city is bracing. I agree with you about the air, and the sky at dawn, and I’m missing them now, too.

DWW — You’re absolutely right. All the mourning seemed to occur before we arrived. When we got there, the occasion and the place conspired to make all of us happy to be living our lives.

Ben, It seems only right that the end of someone’s life should be the time for a powerful, healing ceremony. How wonderful that this is your profession, to preside over something like that. So few of us get to bring that to people. By the way, the Rwandan priest, Father Bernardin, is the parish priest at Our Lady of the Snows, in a town called Westwood, which is not the same as the place where UCLA is. Westwood is thirty miles from Susanville, near some beautiful lakes. Just in case you’re driving up that way. xoxo

Wonderful post. It very much reminds me of something Kathleen Norris would write (I was just reading Kathleen Norris before I read your post, in fact).

I suspect that what you experienced in Susanville is the alchemy of a funereal which makes presiding at “services of witness to the resurrection” (that’s what we Presbyterians call the funeral mass) one of my favorite responsibilities as clergyman. When it’s done right a funeral is a powerful, healing moment in the life of a family and a community.

I hope I get to meet that Rwandan priest someday.

In all seriousness, my condolences on your uncle’s death, and know that I caught my breath along with you when I read about that pre-dawn parking lot. Beautiful, beautiful job bringing us right there.

Dear John, I hadn’t expected it to be such a terrific week — I think you’re right: there’s something about being in a community when people stop, come together, and eat macaroni salad in celebration of life that’s like nothing else I do.

Oh, but litlove, you do! All those lovely villages, the ones where not much seems to be happening but, in fact, a lot really is — those are England’s Susanvilles.

Lilalia, He was a charming rascal, I think. A wonderful guy.

DD: You’re right — a wonderful place. I’m amazed I never went to those lamb barbeques — my mother did, and although she mentioned them every once in a while, I assumed they were for people other than me. The thing I really loved about my week up there was learning how welcoming people can be.

Dear Jade — sounds like the true tahoe! Does that woodpecker-chasing-away thing work though? They’ve always seemed impervious to insult.