When the man’s cries died down, a hymn sung by an unseen choir began. The camera angle was positioned from the choir loft, the church spread out below. While the hymn continued, a procession made its way down the central aisle: a priest with a tall gold cross, altar boys holding candles, and following them an elaborate casket, part of it draped in silk and stitched with orchids, purple and white.

“Please be seated,” the priest with the cross said, facing the congregation and standing a little apart from the priest clutching the Bible.

To the rattle and thump of seats and kneelers, Malo said, “Church was packed. Standing room only.”

“We gather here to celebrate the life of Daisy Lokelani Hino,” the priest said.

As he spoke, the camera tracked among the pews, going closer, finding grieving face after grieving face—more women than men, and the women looked especially stricken. They were lovely women, masked in sadness, most of them young, Hawaiian or Asian, some of them Black, all in vibrant feathery dresses, weeping as the priest spoke of the life of the woman in the casket.

“Lokelani means heavenly rose,” he said. “The thorns of a rose remind us of Christ’s suffering at the hands of the soldiers at his crucifixion. The rose itself tells us about hope and resurrection in the eternity of heaven.”

Raising his voice, he spoke of love, of forgiveness, of Christ’s compassion—of Mary Magdalene; and he told the story of the woman with the alabaster jar who wept before Christ, her tears falling on his feet, how she wiped them away with her sweet-smelling hair and covered his feet with kisses and then massaged them with the ointment from her jar. Pausing between elements in the story, which was tinged with sensuality, he invoked the name of Daisy Lokelani Hino, using it as a sort of chorus, until it seemed she too was a biblical character, another follower of Christ.

Praying in Hawaiian—“She will hear us, it is her mother tongue”—the priest urged the mourners to understand her immortal soul and to consider that she was not dead, that she lived in the arms of God, that her spirit dwelled within the hearts of everyone present, to guide them.

“Grief is holy,” he intoned. “Lokelani is not dead. She is showing us the way to salvation.”

And so for the next half-hour Deputy Chief Malo sat before the monitor, absorbed in the funeral service, as alert as though he were seeing it for the first time. At intervals, covertly, he pressed his fists to his eyes, and when he took them away his eyes were puffy and reddened with tears.

Moved by the display of mourning and by the sweetness of the hymns, the harmonies echoing in the church, Olive took Sharkey’s hand. It was cold, as lifeless as a slab of meat, and yet he was attentive, watching closely the progress of the service.