Angel

“Angel” is the Sarah McLachlan song sung at Will Bleakley’s memorial service in Crystal River after the 2009 boating disaster. Its role is brief but decisive: when the piano begins and Will’s cousin sings, the song breaks through Nick Schuyler’s efforts to endure the ceremony and gathers grief, gratitude, guilt, and spiritual connection around the memory of his dead best friend.

Appearance at the Memorial

“Angel” is performed during the service attended by Nick Schuyler, Paula Oliveira, Marcia Schuyler, Kristen Schuyler, and the families of Will Bleakley, Marquis Cooper, and Corey Smith. The ceremony has already made Will’s death physically and publicly real for Nick: photographs, flowers, and Will’s baseball and football jerseys occupy the front of the church, including his University of South Florida jersey. Against this setting of family memory and athletic identity, the song becomes part of the communal act of remembering Will rather than a private recollection alone.

Will’s cousin sings “Angel” with piano accompaniment and, according to Nick’s account, has a beautiful voice. The music does not soften the event into calm remembrance. As soon as the piano starts, Nick becomes hysterical and says he does not think he has ever cried so hard. The song releases feelings that the formal ceremony has contained: sadness, anger, frustration, and guilt, along with the desire to scream or strike something.

Connection to Will

The song’s central significance comes from its placement beside Nick’s memories of Will’s final hours. Nick had been with Will until the end and had been the last person to witness his death. He also believed that Will had done everything possible to prolong his life during the forty-three hours at sea. Their cooperation had helped keep Nick alive, so the memorial was not only a farewell to a friend but also a confrontation with the debt Nick felt he could never repay.

That debt makes the song’s angelic association more than decorative funeral symbolism. Nick had sent Will’s parents a bouquet with the message, “To the family of the angel that saved my life. He will never be forgotten.” The song therefore echoes a meaning Nick has already assigned to Will: Will is remembered as a dead friend, but also as someone whose actions contributed to the survivor’s continued life.

Grief, Guilt, and Spiritual Meaning

While “Angel” is being performed, Nick’s thoughts turn toward impossible alternatives. He wonders whether he could have performed CPR better, given Will his jacket for a time, or helped him go beneath the overturned boat. The song does not resolve those questions; it makes them emotionally unavoidable. Its effect is to draw the remembered scene at sea into the church, so that the memorial becomes a second encounter with the moment Nick could not save Will.

The music also participates in a spiritual connection that Nick experiences through the service. Reverend David Lane, who had visited Nick in the hospital, stands near the altar beside Will’s picture after the ceremony. Nick embraces him and feels connected to Will through their shared history of prayer. In that sequence, “Angel” helps move the memorial from factual confirmation of death toward an attempt to locate Will within faith, memory, and the continued moral life of the survivor.

Narrative and Memorial Function

The song’s meaning is shaped by the book’s larger problem of testimony. Nick presents himself not as a hero but as the only survivor able to tell what happened, and he writes in order to give the families an account grounded in fact rather than rumor. “Angel” belongs to the later public process through which private loss is made communal: Will’s funeral, the memorial services for the three men, the tattoo bearing their initials, and the Nick Schuyler Foundation, which raises money for causes associated with the dead men and the Coast Guard.

Within that process, the song fixes one emotional image of Will for those who remain. It does not erase the uncertainty surrounding Nick’s perceptions at sea, including the unexplained light he believed he saw while freezing in the water, nor does it answer why Nick survived when the others did not. Instead, it gives form to the grief that factual reconstruction cannot contain. The song’s recurrence in Nick’s memory links the public ritual of Will’s memorial with the private burden of being the last person left to tell the story.