The Ancestor Vigil ends with a benediction that I’ve done a bajillion times. But last night, as we reviewed the ritual before we started, I told the rest of the clergy team that I wanted to say something between the Charge and the benediction. And I added the phrase I have written and read almost as many times in this last hard year of death–Hail, the Traveler! What is remembered, and honored, lives.

In the season of honor and love, of forgiveness and hauntings, give a thought to those who are still traveling the shadowed road of grief. Tend them as you can and tend your own grief as you travel with them. May the road be traveled with some little light.