There's a weird poetry in loss. I was twenty when a close friend of mine committed suicide. A few months later, my father died of liver cancer. A few more months after that, my young cousin was killed in a random farming accident in Kansas, leaving behind a wife and a nine month-old baby. I attended my cousin's funeral on my 21st birthday. All three men were baptized Christians. All three were youngest sons.

Right after everything happened, I spent three months working at a wilderness camp in the north woods of Wisconsin, writing most of All Saints' Day's songs on a moldy piano I found in a cabin that overlooks 3300-acre Long Lake. Then I went back to college, and dragged myself every Sunday to an Anglican church in the Chicago suburbs. I didn't realize this while I was writing it, but "Cathedral Pines" takes that Anglican church and plants it squarely over the top of Long Lake, like a double exposure photo, or maybe a canoe.

After experiencing so much loss, it seemed really important de-fang grief somehow. When the band that would be Youngest Son started playing shows, "Think About Your Troubles" became a sort of anthem for us. Harry Nilsson originally wrote "Troubles" for a children's album he made while tripping on acid. We interpreted the song's title as a directive, and made it our mission to proclaim it to the whole campus, as if college students needed any help thinking about their troubles. Almost everybody I knew was on depression medication at the time. I thought I was being funny.

Long Lake was a shapeshifter, and it was always with us: jewel-blue and inviting on sunny days, dotted with sailboats and canoes; a choppy gray during storms; glassy and lined with fog in the early mornings. I would sit by the lake, and think, and read, and remember, and talk-- with my dad, with my friend, with my cousin, with God.

At midnight one evening near the end of the summer, my friend Marty and I got in one of the camp's giant Voyageer canoes and rowed out to the middle of Long Lake. The sky was clear and the lake was calm. It was the tail end of the Perseids--the occasional meteor would arc across the sky, breaking the stillness. Tiny campfires flickered on the shoreline in the distance. We spent a lazy and beautiful hour and a half out there-- night sky above, night sky reflected below, with Marty and me suspended in the middle. Every few minutes, children's voices would echo across the lake: counselors were sneaking their campers out in canoes like ours, singing hymns in the dark. "We're surrounded by so much goodness here," Marty said.

The night my father died, I sat, too tired to sleep, in the dark of the basement in the house where he had died - crushing a dozen or so of the 1000 paper cranes local middle school students had made for him, cranes we had hung years ago but which had started to fall off the walls, and which none of us had had the energy to hang back up and had instead draped over couches, chairs, anything we could sit them on to prevent them from tangling - reading e-mails as they flew in from friends and relatives, carrying notes of encouragement, rambling emotional outpourings, quotations from books, and Scripture passages, including this one from Hosea:

"When Israel was a child, I loved him as a son, and I called my son out of Egypt. But the more I called to him, the more he rebelled. ...

"Oh, how can I give you up, Israel? How can I let you go? ...

"For someday the people will follow the LORD. I will roar like a lion, and my people will return trembling from the west.

I could not read or think or pray in the weeks after Dad died, so I hand-copied each of those e-mails into my journal and read them when there was nothing else to do - which was all the time - until I had memorized the Scripture passages and the quotations from books and the rambling emotional outpourings and the notes of encouragement, and also a letter, tucked into the back of the journal - the last letter my father wrote me - which I will not share because it is mine not yours, except I will share the last line: "I love you, my favorite youngest son."

I do not like to write about this, because we love him and we miss him, and his memory is ours, not yours. When I was twenty and in college, my friend Stephen killed himself by stepping in front of a train.

"Wake" isn’t so much about Stephen as what it felt like to miss him. I didn't have thoughts for Stephen, but I would sit at the piano and play the same chords for hours on end. I never got tired of them. I would sit in class and daydream about going to the piano and playing those chords. Eventually they became "Wake".

There were these train tracks on our college campus, and they went right by the apartment where I lived- a constant reminder of Stephen. Usually the tracks carried slower freight trains, but every once in awhile a high-speed Metra passenger train would howl by, lighting up the evening with its Edward-Hopper-green glow₁. The trains interrupted conversation and made us late to class.

An uncomfortable reality when you live in the Chicago suburbs: people step in front of Metras. It happened while several of my friends were riding into the city a few months after Stephen died, and then again a few weeks later, right outside the studio where I was pulling an all-nighter to record an early version of "Wake." Twenty years before, a student from my college, also named Steven, had knelt down in front of a Metra train during the school term, at the intersection right by the apartment where I spent my junior year. Stephen and I had discussed him once, when I was a freshman, with a friend, talking late into the night.

You start to get tired of the poetry of loss.

My friend Charity, who had also known Stephen, painted a mesmerizing, wall-sized Metra on a canvas for her senior art project. Then she did pencil portraits of five of us who had been close to Stephen. While we sat for her, she interviewed us--about Stephen's death, and missing Stephen, and knowing Stephen while he was alive. When Charity's show opened, the train took up the entire south wall of the gallery, and in our portraits the five of us appeared to be staring at it.

I tried to do a similar thing with "Wake." Every lyric in the song comes from a conversation I had with one of Stephen's friends. I tried to give voice to the community of people who missed him. In every line, I refer to him as "love," because I think it would've made him uncomfortable. We do love him, and we miss him. Those same friends tell me they cannot and will not listen to "Wake." I have a weird ambivalence about it too. I don't like performing it or listening to it. And I don't really like looking at Charity's painting. But what else can we do? The thing happened; we can't make it un-happen. So we just kind of carry it around - all this art we can't get rid of, and a friend we still miss.

"Just as sacramental theology speaks of a doctrine of the Real Presence, maybe it should speak also of a doctrine of the Real Absence because absence can be sacramental, too, a door left open, a chamber of the heart kept ready and waiting."

-Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth

"At last big-faced Norval Tawes read Scripture and prayed. 'O Death, where is thy sting?' Norval Tawes called out, and his little black eyes glittered on Hugh.

"Hugh thought, 'Just about everywhere, since you ask.'"

-Annie Dillard, The Living

One year to the day after Marty and I had our midnight canoe ride on Long Lake, a young man drowned there. He was the younger brother of a friend of ours - just a kid, a college student. He went out to the lake just before sunrise, talking about baptism, and he didn't come back.

I don't understand. I don't understand.

On November 2, 2007, at about 10:30 AM, my dad died in the bedroom he shared with my mom in our Missouri house. One year later--down to the minute--I found myself at the Anglican church I attended in Illinois, celebrating the feast of All Saints' Day. My good friend was being baptized-- welcomed into the church, confirmed as an Anglican, and "sealed as Christ's own forever"--so I'd crawled out of bed that morning to attend.

Our preacher, a woman named Katherine whose husband Stewart is the rector at the church, gave a brief history of the feast day. On All Saints' Day we celebrate the life of the church, past, present and future. This means it's a day of reverence, for church fathers and historic saints throughout the ages. It's also a day of remembrance, for loved ones and church members who have died, including our parents and spiritual mentors. Finally, it's a day of anticipation, looking forward to the saints who are going to follow us, including children, new believers, and babies not yet born. Mingling grief with celebration, it's one of the two feast days in the church year--with the Easter Vigil--on which baptisms are performed.

The service is hours long and builds to a sort of fever pitch as dozens of babies are baptized. It's a chain reaction: one baby starts crying, then they all start crying, then the congregation laughs. I split the difference and did both.

"Part of the life of faith is understanding that our lives are interdependent with all the saints," said Katherine. Her brother John had died of cancer the past summer, while I was sitting beside Long Lake. He had been the worship leader at the church for years, and the congregation was celebrating its first All Saints' Day feast without him. For John, worship meant entering the holy of holies each Sunday, joining our voices with the saints and angels. Or, as Katherine put it, "faith means learning to see our individual lives as one stroke in a larger painting. Without those before and after us, the painting is incomplete."

At the beginning of the baptism service, Father Stewart gave thanks for the water, dipping the bottom of the giant Christ candle into the font and stirring it. Then he moved through the congregation, using olive branches to sprinkle us with water from the baptismal font. This practice, called aspergis, is meant to put the congregation in mind of our own baptisms.

I was baptized by my dad, a Methodist minister, when I was twelve, in a lake in Missouri, surrounded by family and friends. Just before dunking me under and administering the rite of baptism, Dad cracked a joke based on a Flannery O'Connor short story he misremembered as being about a father who baptizes his son and then immediately drowns him. "Trust me?" he said, looking me in the eyes, getting laughs from the faithful on the shore.

Dad literally ghost-wrote his funeral in the months before he died, choosing all the hymns and Scripture passages. "We will not sing 'It Is Well With My Soul'," he'd insisted. "This will be a celebration!" He'd enlisted his three closest pastor friends to preach the gospel. If he'd been Baptist there would've been an altar call. I still remember singing all his favorite hymns with everyone I'd ever known growing up, even all the people I never really liked.

On my 21st birthday, at my cousin Christopher's funeral in Kansas, the pastor-- Chris's high school principal--preached for a half hour to the thousands of people who had gathered in the school's gymnasium to remember him. Through tears and gritted teeth, he urged us to see the larger joy in our grief, that God endures the death of his saints only to allow the church to continue her work of redeeming the world, "to bring about that many people should be kept alive." Then we sang Christopher's favorite hymn: "The Wonderful Grace of Jesus". Most everyone there knew it by heart, because Chris had always led them in singing it.

At Stephen's memorial service at our college, the air was heavy and thick. His mother wept vocally throughout the service. After it was over, nobody spoke. It was strange: we all lingered awkwardly, each lost in his or her own world. Eventually a handful of friends and I went to someone's place. I think we watched a movie.

One All Saints' Day feast, a baby was brought forward whose parents were raised in the Orthodox tradition and requested that she be fully immersed in the baptismal font, as is customary for adults, instead of being sprinkled with water from it as infants normally are. Father Stewart gently submerged her, then quickly pulled her from the font. She shrieked in terror while Father Stewart bellowed with joyful laughter.

I'm still looking for the resurrection of the dead, for the life of the world to come. Every year I sit through two consecutive All Saints' Day feasts, laughing and crying and looking. Look--there's my friend, on the other side of the baptismal font, dripping wet, holding a candle, singing with the rest of us. Glistening, shivering, new.

Eventually you get around to just missing them. Stephen was hilarious. He was one of the funniest people I've ever known. Even the depressing things he said were hilarious. Especially the depressing things. His humor rang true and cut deep. Christopher's smile was contagious, his sense of humor kind. His jokes kept family conversations running smoothly; without him we're a bit more awkward, a bit more hesitant.

Every story in this song is true--a verse about Stephen, then one about Chris, then one about Stephen, then one about Chris. I like that humor is the common thread-- Stephen getting pulled onstage at an improv club, Chris joking about his wife's baby-bump. I like that it was so urgent to my body, or God, or whatever, that I wake up in the middle of the night and remember that these guys make me laugh.

"Long Year" is a prayer I wrote roughly a year after dad died. The bridge is from Psalm 131, which my dad had printed on the inside of his funeral bulletin. He told me once that his prayer for me was that I would be able to say those words and mean them.

I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction
-Czeslaw Milosz

By my third All Saints' Day feast at the Anglican church, Father Stewart was clued in to the kid laughing and crying during the baby baptisms every year. As he served me Communion, he suddenly grabbed my shoulder and prayed aloud that God would give me eyes to see the invisible. Then he poured oil on his thumb, painted a cross on my forehead, and gave me "the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven."

It's me and Marty in that canoe again: night sky above, night sky reflected below. I'm trying, father, every day, to see it.

Celebrant:
Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and
fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?

People:
I will, with God's help.