Stay with me: marking the time of a loved one's death is both a duty and a privilege.

They tell you that it can last quite a long time, this labored, wide-eyed breathing that heralds impending death. Days, even.

It lasted a few hours for my mother. A little less for my friend Ernie. Two dreadfully anticipated deaths, two unexpected trips to the very edge of life.

There's little left to say in these hours, under the best of circumstances.

"How I love you."

"Just rest. It's OK. I'm right here."

"I love you so much."

"Oh."

You breathe. You hold a hand, smooth a brow, rest a fingertip gently, saying goodbye to cherish ed heartbeats.

And, if you've gotten the hang of it before now, you pray, maybe starting with "Our Father, who art in heaven..."--the only words you can remember, as far as you can get before the tears get in the way. "Our Father, who art in heaven ... thy will be done" is about how it went for me once or twice, maybe three times, reminding my heart of what my soul already knew. And then, slipping the tether of words, easing deeply, deeply into prayer, breathing my mother's breathing, breathing my friend's breathing, praying death.

God held us then, both of us together, his breath on our faces, separated from us by only the flimsiest of veils. Had I been bold enough, I could have reached out and brushed the thin cloth aside and eternity would have flooded in. Peace stilled my hand. No words anymore or ever again. Only breath and prayer and love.

And then, only love.

They tell you the eyes don't always stay closed, but my mother's did and so did Ernie's. You have to take your time. It was my first gesture toward the bodies of my mother and my friend: to rest my hand for long moments on their foreheads and to close their eyes. These were the first moments of remembering.

I remembered the blue of my mother's eyes watching in satisfaction from her bed as my husband played with her cat, knowing that Smokey would have a good home. I remembered Ernie, wide-eyed in mock outrage as he told one of his barely repeatable, very politically incorrect jokes. "Insulting to sensitive persons," he would say, "not that we have any around here!" Tears running down my face, I remembered.

We sat for a long while. I stroked my mother's hands, hands I had known so well in life, so tiny, smoothing them with a favorite scent. I patted Ernie's hands, the expressive hands of a scholar, hands I had not known well at all. The prayer was different now, a prayer of release, breathing gratitude, touching gingerly at the edges of a yawning absence.

The warmth of the body lingers, as we do, accommodating itself slowly to a new emptiness. Our hearts follow reluctantly once more to the truth that our souls have already grasped: The spirit is gone. We bury our faces in God's shoulder then, sobbing our prayer, wordless again.

It used to be, and still is in some countries, that we sat with the body of the ones we love at this time, lighting candles, praying together, marking the quick passing of the spirit with our own slower transition. Day passed into night and night into day with our prayer and simple rituals.

Sometimes these days we want to move it all along too quickly, or well-meaning people want to move it along for us, or we just don't want to be in the way or to take up other people's time. Death is quickly coiffed, dressed, made up, hardened, and packaged for suitable display, greeting, and formal prayer.

We can still claim this time to sit, to rest, to remember. We pray, keeping such vigil as we can. These hours just after death are most truly ours, a time when we remain together, dead and alive, mussed, soft, and tear-stained. We have shared hours or days or months of unspeakable intimacy, of wrenching prayer, of unexpected peace.

Before all the talk intrudes, before we're muffled with condolences and with the laughter of grieving, let us take a few long hours of silence with the body of our loved one. Let us take the time to gently touch the last of their warmth, this final intimacy, and not pass it on to strangers. Let us entrust ourselves to God.

We sit few of us, with our own thoughts. We talk quietly, we sit in silence, we tell stories, laughing softly, tenderly beginning to recognize the past.

We find ourselves dropping into prayer as a runner at the end of a race, drained and spent and weak with exhaustion, counting on God to catch us. It's good to discover just now that God will catch us, good to know this in the long days to come. We recollect God's breath on our face, the thinness of the veil between us and eternity, and we smile a little, knowing what we can never un-know.

Ann LeBlanc, a psychologist in Maine and author of How to Go to Confession if You Don't Know How (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2003).