Yesterday I went to a funeral. Although I’d been to other events to honor the dead and still haven’t been to a funeral where I’d known the recently departed, I’d attended past funerals with others who were (like me) mostly going as a “community responsibility” and weren’t particularly close to the dead. Yesterday, though, I went to the funeral of a man who’d been a good friend of my buddy Don Beto so I had a chance to experience the more human, emotional aspects of the grieving that inevitably accompanies a passing. Although the rituals of a Salvadoran funeral differ from those in the states-- everybody is served coffee with a tamale and slice of sweet bread, the wake runs all through the evening, everybody sings while proceeding to the cemetery on foot from the church—the individuals really affected by the death behaved very similarly to Americans. Everybody struggles for something to say to the surviving family, people laugh through tears as they tell stories about the departed, and then a few of the guys sneak off to the bar to drown their sorrows.