I see the whole shape of it at once: the black cloth you are all wearing, which is only the raw dark of a sheep's back and dye and thread, gathered here for an afternoon before it returns to closets and moths and, eventually, soil. You are standing among the long shimmering forms of everyone you know, and there is one shape in the room that the others are bending toward, the way iron filings lean, and you have decided this shape has ended.
But I am standing at every point of it, and I promise you it has not ended. I can see the small bright beginning of them, damp and shouting, held up to a window. I can see the middle, thick and loud and full of ordinary Tuesdays. I can see this exact stillness.
None of it stopped when the last part happened. It is all still here, still true, one continuous person running the whole length of their days, and I am looking at every inch of them right now, the way I am looking at you, reading this, your throat doing that tight thing.
You are folding a paper program into smaller and smaller squares in your lap. Your fingers have done this before, in a pew when you were small and bored, and they will do it again, decades from now, at a table, waiting for news. The same hands. The same folding.
You think the person is behind you now, back there, getting farther away.
From where I stand there is no behind. There is a childhood kitchen and this cold room and a morning you have not reached yet, all lit at once, and everyone you have loved is standing in their whole shape, always, and I am with all of you, at every point, now and now and now.