Fifty feet away, Diana Olmstead watched Pars and Ana and the Mountie below. She sat on a boulder, her cane to one side. For such a large woman, she looked remarkably elegant, sitting upright, one leg crossed, the other dangling over the rock. She too had been waiting to be near the site, to be near them. For she was convinced her sister was out there over the ocean, along with all the other souls of the dead. She could feel it at that moment, the air slightly electric, as if a current were humming overhead. She’d had this feeling many times before, when her granddaughter had been born and she was in the hospital room, when her own husband died at home in bed: the same door that both life and death passed through.

She sat quietly on the rocks, her eyes half closed, fingers lightly cradling a string of prayer beads. She’d brought the beads back from Dharamsala, each one carved from the bodhi tree, anchored with a tiny hammered silver ball and a small tassel of dyed yak wool. She fingered the string with her right hand as she recited the little she remembered of the Bardo Todrol Chenmo, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead—which she’d studied for a year in Dharamsala. It was important particularly at that moment, just as it was when she’d first learned the news, to be calm and focused, to be free from negative thoughts. For this was the delicate time, the narrow time, the intermediate state, when the souls of the dead needed help; and by reciting the words over and over—a kind of Kaddish, a friend once called it—she gave guidance and comfort to the dead, especially those who’d died violently and unexpectedly, those who needed it the most. The chanting helped the dead pass from their present form into their next incarnation.