On the eve of Christmas Eve my Aunt Abi passed away.

I'm not sure how it happened. I visited her in the hospital on Monday afternoon. She seemed confused, but not near death. A couple of days later she was intubated. Two days after that she was gone. The speed was overwhelming.

Her wake and visitation was on the twenty-eighth of December...kibitzing friends and family, like it was any family party, missing only beer, cocktails and a living Aunt Abi.

Her funeral was the next day, a Catholic mass presided over by an enthusiastic priest...altar boys, saints.

Aunt Abi left behind four siblings including my dad. She was the fourth of five, seventy-six years old and the first of the siblings to go. Hard to fathom. Not that she would be the first, but that any of them would ever go.

They are the pillars that bear us all.

Five siblings on earth together for over seventy years, watching each other grow, skinning their knees together, attending each others' graduations and weddings, watching each others' kids grow up...and then grandkids. Lives intermittently intertwined and distant. Laughing, suffering, learning, anger fleeting, caring, cajoling, supporting. Gray advancing in whispers. Their life experiences could write ten thousand books.

Generations roll. So do funerals. But life and funerals are made of moments...here is one.

At the end of the service Aunt Abi was wheeled out in her wooden casket (she requested cremation). The priest halted her by the doors leading to the vestibule for a final blessing. He motioned the siblings to come forward. They did, moving with less vigor than in their youth, but with as much purpose. The priest stepped aside.

There they were, three standing, one in a wheelchair...gathered to their sister. Get this picture. I was seeing them from behind. Everyone standing back...except the four. Two brothers, two sisters. Their heads bowed, one next to the other, deep thought, respectful. Faces weathered by life, shoulders hunched slightly from the bearing of it. Thinking of their sister-the one who had abruptly left the party. Four who remained...holding their sister in their hearts and life in their years.

It was said once that life is a series of goodbyes. And, like it or not, it is.

My eyes began to blur. And voices of long ago, of saints and of sinners seemed to echo through the sanctuary of my mind. And they said simply...value life.

And again...