Today, our family came together in Page County, Va. at the church where my sister and I (and our parents, and our grandparents, and cousins and aunts and uncles) grew up, for the funeral of my father‘s oldest brother, Bill Modisett. He was a quiet man who loved reading about history and current events. He graduated with a chemistry degree from Bridgewater College in the 1950s and spent most of his life living on the family farm and working at Luray Caverns. His presence was always a quiet and calm one, his smile and laugh a lot like Dad’s.

His funeral was at Leaksville United Church of Christ, the place where I learned from my mother, the organist there for 40 years, how to be a church musician. I played the old hymns again – “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Blessed Assurance.” We included Bach, because Uncle Bill loved classical music, and “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” as a meditation, because a chaplain played it for him in his last weeks and he smiled when he heard it.

After the service we had lunch in the church basement – fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and sweet tea. My niece and nephew explored with Dad the cemetery where Meg and I used to play as children, running through the graves of our family, surrounded by the saints gone before. We stopped at the stones of our namesakes – our grandmothers Ruth Rinaca and Ruth Modisett, our great-grandmother and great-grandfather, Martha Ellen Coffman and Staige Hite Modisett.