Awe

At the last word, “forgiveness,” men turned to one another to shake hands, clasp arms, chuckle softly, and make eye contact in the aftermath of allowing goodness its own speech. The room seemed illuminated. Standing at the back of the chapel, Louis and I broke a rule: we embraced. We did so at that slightly oblique angle at which men are wont to hug, one leaning a shoulder into the chest of the other.

That kind of embrace was the last act of reverence between Rolf and me. A couple of weeks before his death, he had been reclining on his couch in the living room, drifting in and out toward a deep sleep; the opiates rendered it oceanic and dreamlike. He rose to a sitting position on the couch and called me, my wife, Mollie, and our daughters, Natalie and Serafina, over to come near him. We pulled in chairs, sitting in a semicircle around him. He gave each of us gifts, telling stories, so often humorous and quirky, about the place of our moral beauty in his life. My gifts were a red, white, and blue wristband, reminiscent of the headband of the same colors that I wore every day when I was thirteen, and a French Opinel knife. I touch its wooden handle every day. The sensations that arise through that tactile contact make me think of Rolf’s hands.

Labored, deliberate, Rolf slowly stood up. Body angled by pain, he shuffled to his kitchen. I followed, my body’s motion synced up with his since our first years of life. There we embraced. For only two or three seconds. But it felt longer. As we released, he looked to the ground and said:

We made our way.

Other than those words, I can’t really remember what we all said that last day in conversation. There was no summing up of a life or speechmaking. What I remember is feeling his chest and shoulder leaning into mine, the top of his head touching near my temple, his large hands on my shoulder blades, and the feelings of awe that ensued. I feel this tactile impression of Rolf today when I embrace people, like Louis. It brings to my mind Rolf’s face and eyes. I can almost hear his laugh, and how he answered the phone “Dachman!” It sends me down webs of memories of his courage, kindness, strength, and overcoming: how as a fifth grader he protected the least popular girl in my seventh-grade class from eighth-grade bullies; how he loved to barbecue for large crowds of friends; how he could throw a softball into the sky until it would disappear; or how in his everyday work as a speech therapist he taught the impoverished and most ignored children in our country, who have lived lives thrown off course by ACEs, to utter the sounds of speech. Allowing goodness its own speech.

My default self rightly observes that I will never feel that embrace again, or be inspired by new acts of his moral beauty. But my body tells me in this sense of being touched that he is still somehow nearby. That our life together is registered in some permanent, electrochemical awareness in the millions of cells in my skin that make sense of being embraced by my brother. That there is something beyond the corporal body of others’ lives that remains in the cells of our bodies when they leave. And that there is so much moral beauty, and so much good work to do.

FIVE COLLECTIVE EFFERVESCENCE

How Moving in Unison Stirs the Awe of Ritual, Sport, Dance, Religion, and Public Life

Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and that quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation. . . . Probably because a collective emotion cannot be expressed collectively without some order that permits harmony and unison of movement, these gestures and cries tend to fall into rhythm and regularity.

• ÉMILE DURKHEIM

After graduating from college, Radha Agrawal led a hard-charging life in New York City as an investment banker, drinking cocktails she had no thirst for and having conversations that left her mind wandering. Things changed at Burning Man, the annual celebration in the Nevada desert.