Hundreds crowded into the theatre to witness and memorialize Gabriel’s life. Family and friends shared stories, laughter, and sadness communally to send Gabriel’s spirit across the chasm of space and time in a “canoe of songs and paddles made of tears” to the distant stars’ shore and take his place as ancestor for the clan and the uncle who plays with all the nieces and nephews yet unborn. As Wordsworth wrote:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come“

And after the sleep and slumber and we pass to the ancestors and understand all the unknown and share again in the joy of one another.

I end this with the same benediction of last November 3. Go Vote. You Matter.