death or arrange a funeral. This is no fault of theirs; clergy and churches are merely one consumer option in the designer-funeral, among many. And that means, when we walk with a spouse, a child, or a family through the valley of the shadow of death, we are going to need to recover and teach them an old language and reinvigorate a set of practices to help them make sense of what they are going through. What I’ve just described became an existential reality for me in the middle of a funeral liturgy