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Family drinking and funeral language merge into a lyric where keeping the night alive becomes indistinguishable from letting someone die.

The title gives the page ritual gravity, but the poem itself is intimate and accusatory. It watches a family convert grief into continuation, with Scotch and irresponsibility becoming part of the atmosphere of moral exhaustion.

`Ashes to Ashes Dust to Dust` — a wake for a woman named Fay in which Scotch is abundant and the family wants the night to go on, to `make of the night her life still alive`. The irresponsibility is confessed, not apologized for.