All right, let's begin

 

Welcome, everyone. It's so wonderful to see so many family and friends here to honor and celebrate will. The purpose of this event is for those who loved Will to come together and be one, and be with one another and celebrate and honor his life.

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And so before we begin, I just want to set the mood and set the moment. So if people want to grab the hand of someone next to them, everyone doesn't have to be linking hands. So it doesn't have to be a circle. But just if there's someone next to you, grab their hand and be together, and let's just close our eyes and breathe and feel the lake, and the moment

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And the reason that I wanted to do that is that events like this are hard, it's not easy. Will was taken from us in the most cruel way. And the grief and the pain and the anger and the sadness are just right here all the time. And so we want to honor that pain and that loss and that absence. It's a huge hole in our lives, and in this place, having Will not here.

 

While Will was a New Englander through and through, he also had roots in Louisiana and I love the African American tradition of the jazz funeral, where the brass band leads the procession to the cemetery in a slow dirge and after they bury the body they break out into joyous song, and everyone sings and dances, and then they drink, and then they drink some more. and then they drink some more. Not encouraging necessarily all that drinking.

 

But I also want to encourage. This is also such a joyous occasion, and so today will hopefully enable us to be together and share our grief. But also remember the joy, the kindness, and the singular spirit that was Will Cabell.

 

And our program, which is quite informal, points to this. So I want to thank Giada and Emmy and Iris and Ellie for helping create the program. And so we will start with a prayer by Alicia Bonner. Excuse me, and then Patrick Cabell will lead a young person's chorus and a song and then we will do remembrances, and we want to encourage anyone who feels called to say something about Will. This could be a memory, or what he meant to you, or how you're feeling right now. It could be a poem or a passage from a book that embodied will or a letter from years ago. I just want to stress this informal and so I encourage anyone to join. But I also know that grief might be difficult for some folks to talk, and that's okay, too. Not everyone has to talk if they don't want to

 

And then we'll have a champagne toast, and then, in the spirit of will, we will end with a sing-along