“Life is in the transitions.”
—William James (1842–1910). American philosopher, psychologist, and father of American pragmatism.
I was seven, a skinny, average-height boy standing on the neighbor’s porch. The white clapboard house rose tall, its long windows draped in lace curtains. But at one window, the curtain had been pulled back and the green blind raised, as if inviting me to press my face against the glass. Inside, an open casket cradling an old woman. Her dress, light lavender with a large lace collar. Her waist, small. Her figure, tall and slender. Beyond the casket, the room dissolved into shadow.
I had seen a dead person before, so it wasn’t death that lured me across the road that afternoon. But I had never seen anyone laid out in a casket, all dressed up for a wake.
My mother had talked about wakes. People stayed up all night with the body, neighbors carried in food, and children fell asleep in corners. I never went to one. What I knew came from scraps I overheard—the rustle of women’s dresses, the scrape of chairs on pine floors, the low murmur of prayers. Where I grew up in southern West Virginia in the late 1940s and ’50s, a wake was as ordinary as rain.
I’ve thought about my neighbor’s wake now and then for seven decades. Each time, I return to my seven-year-old self, standing barefoot on the porch, looking in the window, mesmerized by death’s pale lilac gown.
All those years, that was as far as my reflections went until recently when I was listening to “Four Days Late.” Eight words grabbed hold of me:
“The death watch was over.
Buried four days.”
I know the Biblical story. Jesus waited four days before calling Lazarus’s name—long enough, it was believed, for the soul to depart and the body to begin its decay. What followed could only be proclaimed a miracle.
What grabbed me wasn’t the miracle. It was the emphatic statement:
“The death watch was over.”
With that line lodged in my mind, I began noticing how often the idea of a death watch appears, even when we don’t call it that.
In Judaism, the dead are not left alone. There is shemira—watching. Someone stays with the body, for hours or longer, reading psalms, keeping vigil. The tradition holds that the soul lingers nearby for a time, not yet ready to depart. What struck me was not the theology, but the instinct: don’t leave yet. Something is still happening.
In Islam, too, death unfolds rather than strikes. The community gathers quickly. The body is washed, prayers spoken, and the dead oriented toward Mecca. Nothing casual or rushed. The living tend to the dead carefully, attentively, as if aware that departure is not abrupt but gradual, and that presence is a form of respect.
Buddhist and Hindu traditions go further, understanding death as a process that may take hours or days, consciousness loosening its hold slowly. Those nearby are encouraged to remain calm and steady—not to cling or hurry, but to remain present while something completes itself.
Even in the folk practices my mother described, the same posture holds. People stayed. They watched. They waited. Death was not treated as an emergency to be cleared away, but as a threshold to be witnessed.
I wonder what, exactly, those watchers believed they were watching for.
Not for proof. Not for reversal. But for something to finish—or something to begin. Across cultures and centuries there is a shared intuition that death is not an erasure, but a passage. A crossing—something that unfolds just beyond our ability to see, but not beyond our need to attend.
So, we stay.
The seven-year-old boy I was could not have named that instinct. He only knew to stand barefoot on a porch and look through a window. He didn’t understand death or wakes or souls lingering nearby. But he understood—without words—that he was standing as witness at the edge of something mysterious.
Perhaps that is what a death watch has always been—not a refusal of death, but an act of faith in continuance: a willingness to be present at the threshold, to witness a crossing we cannot explain.
Maybe the watching is how we admit we don’t believe it’s over.
The Wired Researcher 