Tag Archives: Threshold Moments

Death Watch

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“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.

More to This

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“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
—Walt Whitman

Lying on my leather sofa. Scrolling through Facebook reels. My mind is quiet. My heart is unguarded. And then—there he is.

Standing alone on the rocks, guitar slung low, sunset pouring behind him like a benediction. Waves slam against stone, but he’s steady. Rooted. A white t-shirt clings to his chest, a pendant rests just above the place where prayer begins. He looks like someone who’s known both ache and awe but hasn’t run from either.

He strums. And sings.

“I’ve been thinking about dying…”

It grabs me. Grabs me deep. Not the lyric alone—but the way he sings it. Calm. Certain. Like someone who knows not only the shoreline but also the undertow.

I listen to the end. I sit still in its wake.

Later, I call my oldest sister. Ninety. Sharp. Aware. Lucid in a way that startles sometimes. I tell her about it. I play it for her.

Silence.

Then softly, she says, “Play it again.”

I do.

And there it is. The line that undoes me.

“My daughter says we live again…”

A child’s faith. A father’s voice. A goodbye that sounds like a hello in disguise.

She doesn’t ask what it means. She doesn’t need to. Some truths live in the body, not the brain. And some goodbyes don’t speak in past tense.

That’s what struck me about the song—about him—this barefoot man with a guitar and the Atlantic licking at his heels. He wasn’t mourning. He was offering. Not an elegy, but a threshold.

Suddenly I began to wonder—not just about dying, but about the shape of leaving itself.
How often the final word is really the first line of something else.

What I hadn’t yet named—what was already working on me under the music—was the song’s quiet insistence.

Over and over, Mark Scibilia returns to the same plea, almost like a whispered vow:

“Don’t you dare
tell me that there ain’t more to this.“

It isn’t argument. It isn’t doctrine. It’s defiance. He’s not trying to prove an afterlife. He’s refusing a small one.

The line keeps coming back like a tide, not to persuade us but to steady us—reminding us that our lives don’t fit neatly inside a closing. What we give our lives to has a way of exceeding the frame.

When he sings it, it sounds less like belief and more like fidelity: a promise to those he loves,
a promise to the life they’ve shared, a promise that whatever waits beyond this moment must somehow be wide enough to hold them all.

That refrain—there’s more to this—isn’t a conclusion. It’s a refusal to conclude.

What moved me wasn’t simply the lyric, or even the tenderness of a daughter’s faith carried in a father’s voice. It was the way the song refused to close in on itself. More to This doesn’t resolve so much as it opens outward. It leaves space. It resists the neatness of an ending.

I noticed my own response before I noticed the pattern in the song. I didn’t want the ending sealed too tightly. I didn’t want it explained away. I wanted to lean forward, not back.

Once I noticed that, I couldn’t unsee it.

I began thinking about how often endings—especially those that arrive at the moment of death—behave this way. Not declaring an end. Not insisting on finality. But gesturing instead. Toward light. Toward motion. Toward wonder. Toward something unfinished and unnamed.

Literature has long understood how difficult it is to stop speaking.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens sends Sydney Carton to his death with a sentence that looks forward rather than back. “It is a far, far better thing that I do…” The line does not tell us what follows. It simply insists that meaning survives the moment.

Fitzgerald closes The Great Gatsby not on death itself, but on motion. “So we beat on, boats against the current…” The sentence ends. The movement does not. Time presses forward, indifferent but alive.

In Beloved, Morrison refuses to let memory die with the body. “This is not a story to pass on,” she writes—an ending that sounds like a warning and a summons at once.

And in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the novel concludes not with extinction, but with a completed gesture. Something is finished, yes—but not everything ends.

Different writers. Different centuries. Different convictions.

Yet we witness the same reluctance to close the door too firmly.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan does not receive a doctrine. He does not glimpse a mapped-afterlife. What he receives instead is recognition—a sudden clarity that loosens fear’s grip. Terror gives way not because he knows what comes next, but because something essential falls into place before the end.

Death happens. But it does not cancel significance.

Tolstoy never argues that life continues. He simply writes as if meaning does.

What struck me, once I saw it, was how consistent this posture is. Literary endings at the edge rarely snap shut. They soften. They widen. They behave as if language itself resists abrupt closure.

Then I began noticing the same thing outside of books.

Real life, it turns out, leans too.

Emily Dickinson’s last words—“I must go in, the fog is rising”—do not explain themselves. No reassurance. No declaration of belief. Just movement. Go in. Not away. Not gone. Into something obscured, indistinct, impossible to chart.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is said to have asked for “More light.” Not an answer. A desire.

Steve Jobs, famously unsentimental about metaphysics, reportedly died repeating: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.” Awe without explanation. Wonder without commentary.

Claude Monet is said to have murmured simply, “It’s beautiful.”

Different lives. Different beliefs. Different temperaments.

Yet, at the edge, language leans in the same direction—not toward negation, but toward attention. Toward light. Toward something still being apprehended.

What interests me isn’t whether these people believed in an afterlife. Some did. Some didn’t. That’s not the point.

The point is posture.

Faced with an ending, we pause. We soften our language. We gesture rather than conclude. We speak as if relation has not been severed—only altered.

That notion brings me back to the song. To Mark Scibilia standing barefoot on the rocks, Atlantic licking at his heels, singing not a goodbye but a threshold.

Long after it ends, the song keeps playing—not audibly, but somewhere just beneath thought. What lingers isn’t melody so much as stance. The way it opens outward. The way it refuses to settle. The way it leaves me listening.

Perhaps that is the common denominator. Not belief. Not certainty. But attention.

We don’t close the door too fast.

We lean forward instead.

Even after the final note fades, something in us remains listening—
sure, somehow, that there is more to this.

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Remembering
Patrick Allen Duff
March 17, 1960 – January 28, 2021

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