Sometimes Christmas can seem a long way off, even when it’s close. So it was for me when I went to a funeral last Saturday at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. The music was beautiful—a requiem setting by Gabriel Fauré. And the church was warmly populated. That happens when you die in your fifties, a season of life when the living still outnumber the dead.
Midway through the service I felt an interior ache grow. Susan had suffered a long illness. News of her death had not surprised me, or anyone else who knew her. But death is death: vacancy, emptiness, negation. The exquisite singing of the boys’ choir doesn’t sweep away the ugly cancer of death. The youthful purity of their voices seemed to draw attention to it by way of contrast.
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