God be with you til we meet again

Greetings from Denver, home of one of the outstanding public defender programs in the country, and until this past Saturday, of my brother Mike.

I saw him yesterday and knelt by his open casket, and it was comforting to remember, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen." It's a promise I hope for, some days more shakily than others, but that my brother believed in to the marrow. The deacon had his back to us while we said a rosary, but I could see him wiping away tears. It was gratifying to learn how well he'd known my brother, as did the monsignor, who remembered my brother in the homily today.

As we waited for Mass to start today, my heart broke all over again seeing the tenderness and grief of my parents and sisters. Somehow, through the incongruity or the sentimentality of it, it eased my heart greatly to hear the pianist playing a hymn from my default culture, "God Be With You Till We Meet Again". We lowered him down at the foot of the Front Range under a beautiful Western sky. Hail and farewell, Mike.

(Bonus links for incorrigibly hard-hearted and cynical public defenders go to two Warren Zevon songs: "Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead" and "Keep Me In Your Heart". I admit that I thought of the first song first, but I felt the second song today. Cancer is a bitch, but in Zevon's death and in my brother's, maybe there's something to all this this talk about redemptive suffering.)