They began to gather early this morning, dropped off by 50 MBTA buses with the words “Firefighters Funeral” flashing across the route marquee. The bus drivers volunteered on their day off and shuttled the firefighters to the service for free.

Firefighter funerals are Viking funerals - grand in scale, simple but profound in their imagery. But this is one of the few instances in which pageantry is personal.

“We aren’t some company, staging an event. These are our brothers,” said Ralph Dowling, who is organizing the logistics of the funerals. “At the end of the day, we produce something that the families will never forget. This is for the families.”

It is also for the firefighters, because they know that what happened to Cahill and Payne could happen to any one of them. And not in something as cataclysmic as 9/11, but as mundane as a grease fire. It is why some off-duty firefighters playing softball at M Street Park in Southie dropped their bats and gloves and raced to Centre Street when they heard firefighters were trapped last week.

“This was a two-bit fire that went bad in four, five minutes.”

20,000 firefighters from around the country are expected to arrive in Boston this week for the services.