As the mourners poured into the Stewart Murphy Funeral Home in the quiet upstate New York town where Sandy spent his last years, I felt as if we were burying not only my uncle, but also the time he'd come to represent.

Sandy was my father's younger brother, a man with a fierce brilliance marred by a lifetime battling manic depression and drug addiction. For readers of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe's 1968 classic about Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, Sandy is memorialized as the troubled sound engineer who, on an LSD binge, thought he could unpaint the Day-Glo bus with his eyes.

As Mr. Wolfe's primary source for the book, Sandy spent hours walking through Central Park with the writer, describing the bus crew's fantastic LSD trips and their rebellion against post–World War II social convention. Sandy was the one who had trouble staying "on the bus," as Kesey referred to staying in tune with the "group mind." To Sandy, that always really meant Kesey's mind. His character has now been romanticized along with the Pranksters' experiment, but it was not a character he was proud of, because he spent most of the rest of his life trying to escape it.

At the age of 20, Sandy ran to Ken Kesey's new American psychedelic family as a way to set himself free from his own broken family and mental illness. In the summer of 1963, he'd been diagnosed with his first major depression and checked himself into Bellevue. On one of his first nights in the hospital, his older brother Carl-who for a period lived near Kesey's acid den on Perry Lane at Stanford University-invited him to leave for the night to go see the opening of the stage version of Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . After the show, Carl introduced Sandy to Kesey. Sandy never went back to Bellevue, though he would spend time in other institutions over the years.

A week after the World Trade Center attack, Sandy entered his most severe depression, though he didn't know anyone directly affected. A month and a half later, he suffered a pulmonary embolism at the Graymore Monastery, where he and his wife Freddi had gone to pray for those who had been lost. He was 59.

He was no longer a rebel. Ten years earlier, he'd moved to the quietude of the country to gain control over his drug addictions and mental illness. There were no traces of Day-Glo at his wake-just his family, members of his church and A.A. group, and his therapist kneeling over his well-groomed corpse, which had been dressed in a pressed gray suit.

A large black-and-white photo next to his coffin showed a blond 20-year-old with a devilish grin, a photo taken when he first joined the Pranksters. Sitting next to it was an album with photos that few had seen: the uniformed Army cadet and a Polaroid of Sandy in prison blues, taken at Rikers Island after his arrest for assault and battery. Underneath the photograph in his own handwriting were the words: "I don't feel as a bad as I look. The sun was in my eyes and the wind was blowing in my hair." There was also a wedding photo of the manic groom dancing with a cigarette and holding the hand of a bride who would be his wife for only six months. No one could remember her name.

Then there was a series of Sandy as a toddler in war-torn Berlin. One showed him coddled by his mother, who would soon leave him behind after the breakup of her marriage.

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe describes a night when Sandy was so high and paranoid on LSD that he climbs to the top of a ravine " screaming incoherently about jumping off the cliffs; until the police come.

" The Monterey Police held him in the jail in Monterey until his brother Chris could get there from New York ," Mr. Wolfe wrote. " Chris ran into Kesey at the jail. We've got to get him out of here, said Kesey. What do you mean? We've got to get him back where he belongs, with the Pranksters. Chris took Sandy back to New York for treatment. It was a long time before Chris knew what in the hell Kesey had been talking about. "

In the funeral home, my father talked about that night. He said that he had received a call from the chief of the Monterey police asking him to come get his brother, saying that Sandy didn't technically do anything wrong, but that he had him in protective custody. When my father arrived at the police station, Kesey was there draped in an American flag. "There was no love between Kesey and me at that moment," my father said. "I was thinking, 'You asshole! You're not going to help him; the police are.'"

Sandy's therapist of 10 years, a small man in a brown tweed coat, said that Sandy revealed that during the Monterey LSD trip he had a flashback to when his mother abandoned him in Berlin. The only other time he had that flashback again was just after the World Trade Center attack, he said.

The life that defined my uncle was not about pushing his mind to the outer limits. It was a painful, daily fight to stay within the limits. Yet Sandy managed to become a leader in Sullivan Country's recovery community. Everyone called him "Duke," and his pastor would seek out his advice. As he found mind-stabilizing drugs, sobriety, a good marriage and a church, he discovered that Kesey's amped-up American dream was empty. For him, Kesey was not an American hero, but a self-indulgent cultish leader who made a lost young man more lost.

But he still obsessed about Kesey. His wife Freddi said that the last 10 years of his life had been a battle between God and Kesey. She said that Sandy wrote dozens of e-mails to Kesey that were never returned. Apparently Kesey was mad at Sandy for shaping the Pranksters' tale for Mr. Wolfe.

Ken Kesey died two weeks after Sandy. The timing was eerie. But while Kesey was buried surrounded by young fans and graying Pranksters, Sandy was buried with an American flag on a hillside surrounded his real found family and bright jack-o'-lanterns.

As I stood over his body to say goodbye, I realized that my uncle died much more a symbol of today than of the psychedelic dream he long ago abandoned. In the final years of his life, he had found the freedom to be devilish on his own terms. That was his last, and best, prank.

As the conversation lulled and I looked to the television, Sarah suddenly blurted out, "Sam and I might be married by a cyber-rabbi."

The announcement was rather surprising. Sarah is a family therapist and probably the least cyber-savvy person I know. She was the last of my friends to get an e-mail account, and she would rather spend a day canning vegetables or dusting her apartment than sinking into the neon bliss of Wired magazine or skipping down the information superhighway.

She is also the least religious Jew I know. She doesn't go to temple. She wasn't bat mitzvahed, and every year she throws a Christmas tree-trimming party, complete with chocolate-covered stocking stuffers and Secret Santas. At her family gatherings, there is a better chance of meeting a Buddhist monk in full saffron robes than a rabbi.

I'll never forget when one of Sarah's therapy patients, who she was convinced hated her, finally opened up when she discovered that Sarah was Jewish. But then, during the week of Rosh Hashanah, as the patient was leaving Sarah's office she turned and said, "Lo shona tova." Sarah later admitted that all she could offer back was an awkward smile.

"Now she not only thinks I'm a fraud as a therapist, but she thinks I'm a fraud as a Jew," she said.

So I was more than a little surprised when she told me she would be married by a rabbi, let alone one she had found on the Internet. As she turned off the TV and flipped on her computer, all I could imagine was a ceremony in which she and Sam were launched into marital bliss by a talking head in a yarmulke.

Now, I'm definitely not a Luddite. I may not think that technology is going to sail us into utopia, but I get it. I know that a cookie is Internet marketing software used to gather personal information on potential Web customers; I worry about too much government regulation of the Internet; and the most personal piece of paper mail I've received in months was one of those mass-produced, phony hand-addressed letters that companies use to trick you into opening their promotions. But it still struck me as odd that Sarah would choose to search the Internet for the person who would commit her and Sam for the rest of their lives. The decision seemed to point to something more profound than just the latest route to information.

"I wasn't actually looking for a rabbi in cyberspace," she admitted. "But while I was surfing for other wedding information, I happened to click on his Web site. His name is Rabbi Dave. He's post-denominational."

What did that mean-that he had moved beyond being a Jew?

Sarah pointed to her computer screen. A voice echoed Shalom, then a picture appeared of a smiling man with a shiny forehead and a caption reading Rabbi Dave.

"Doesn't he look warm?" she asked.

"Have you met him yet?" I asked.

"No, we've been playing telephone tag."

She picked up the receiver, dialed, then handed me the phone to listen:

"Hi, Sarah and Sam, this is Rabbi Dave. I want to congratulate you. You can call me back at this number. I hope I can be of some service on your special day."

He sounded friendly enough and surprisingly professional, as if he had done this a lot.

"He wants Sam and me to meet him at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street next week," she said.

I laughed out loud.

"And did he specify that you wear a certain brand of sneakers?" I asked.

Sarah didn't respond. In fact, she seemed somewhat defensive.

"I don't have a religious community," she said. "My family doesn't have a rabbi. I didn't know where to turn except to the Internet."

I looked toward the screen and read Rabbi Dave's opening statement. "Let me begin by disappointing you and saying that post-denominational is not a movement, per se. In fact, it is the antithesis of a formal movement in Judaism; it is no movement. It is simply the realization that the division of Judaism into movements and labels does no real service to the Jewish people. It pigeonholes people within an often political and politicized grouping, defining the individual all too often in a way that he or she may not wish to be categorized."

I realized that the statement sort of described the way I feel about Judaism. Like Sarah, I identify myself as a Jew, but I wasn't given a religious education and therefore don't feel a part of any Jewish community. Last Rosh Hashanah, my mother called and asked, "Did you at least eat something Jewish?"

"No," I said. "I had sushi."

So I sympathized with Sarah's dilemma and what might have drawn her to Rabbi Dave's on-line congregation. After all, we live in a techno-worshipping culture. As the performance artist Laurie Anderson has said, the Internet and television have become the campfires around which we tell our stories. And I think talk-show hosts have become the media priests to whom we confess. As the old ties of community dissolve into add-water-and-stir gated housing, home shopping networks and drive-through superstores, the Internet has become the place where old roots rejoin to grow new groups. Actually, I prefer to think of it as one big Jewish family, Web site upon Web site, screaming over one another to be heard. So I guess it's not completely absurd that Sarah might find a religious bond through a spontaneous mouse click.

But still, a rabbi who wants to meet at the Holiday Inn?

Sarah agreed this was a little odd.

"He keeps calling me," she said. "He doesn't even know me. He's beginning to sound like a salesman."

A few days later, Sarah called me to say Rabbi Dave was out. In fact, she and Sam had decided not to have a religious ceremony at all. They had found a woman who worked for a biotechnology company on the Internet who also performed wedding ceremonies.

"She started marrying people as a second job because she likes that this work involves being with people on the happiest day of their lives," Sarah said. "I decided that was enough for me."