| Noel: | (half in jest) Ahh, shucks! This poem is a downer! |
| Tara: | (flippantly) Yeah, I thought this was a book about celebration . . . |
| Opapan: | Well, perhaps it is. Why shouldn’t we celebrate a funeral as joyfully as a wedding? |
| Gwen: | (matter-of-factly) Without inner silence, all celebrations are noisy affairs. Birth, marriage, and death are nothing but brief markers within maya’s snare. |
