Christmas and New Year's are special days, each for their own reasons and in their own ways, and both of them have their own kind of music. Christmas has all those carols and jingling bells, and New Year's has Auld Lang Syne. Seems like we always use music in the seasons of life, usually to help us celebrate them in a way that words alone can't.

This past holiday season held more for me than just Christmas and New Year's, though--it also held a wedding and a funeral. I officiated at both, and music was involved.

The wedding came first, in San Francisco. It was a lovely ceremony, with a beautiful bride, a handsome groom, smiling families and happy guests. A professional pianist, who makes much of his living by playing his portable Korg keyboard at weddings and corporate parties, was on hand. The bride had given him a list of songs to play for the time before and during the ceremony and a list to play during the cocktail hour. He was quite good, and the music added just the right touch.

The funeral was as different as, well, as different as a funeral is from a wedding. Somewhat symbolically, I thought, that service was also on the other side of the country, in Miami. It was just three days after the wedding but in a different year. The bride and groom from the wedding have now been married for less than a week. The husband and wife from the funeral (it was for the wife) had been married for more than 65 years. Still, the music added just the right touch.

Some of the music was used as a background in a slide show put together by the family, and the songs just worked. But the music that touched everyone's heart was provided by the widower who was saying goodbye to his beloved wife.

His name is Earl Law, and his late wife, Judy, was my father's first cousin. Theirs was a love that, as I said in the service, the world was privileged to behold. It was one I believe they were created to share with each other, and one way Earl shared his love was through singing. At the funeral service, he sang to Judy one more time.

He is 89 now, and he stood up and sang (a cappella) two verses of I Love You Truly in a voice that is still a pleasure to hear and with a feeling that you can only imagine.

Later I asked him about his music career, and he told me he first sang "professionally" at the age of 12. Music was always his life--it was never his livelihood--and for him it is like breathing. He cannot not sing. And what a joy for me to have heard him sing when he was younger and had a very strong tenor voice as well as now, on this sad but beautiful occasion.

Weddings, funerals, love, relationships, family, forever. All reasons to do good music.