Themes on Grief, Part 3

Jerusalem, the sacred city of my childhood, felt different as I fell asleep that night than it did when I woke up Monday morning, preparing to bury my dad in the red-grey holy soil of Beit Shemesh.

When I woke up, I didn’t yet have the images I would have several hours later, forever it seems now, embroidered into the bloodstream through my heart.

Images like the one of my father’s dead face after the funeral director came over to call us while we were in the simple stone-paved gathering room— half crowded with people by this time, men on the left, women on the right, sitting and standing around unadorned wooden benches.

We had already been called in for Kriyah, the practice of tearing our shirts. The kind wife of my dad’s close Rabbi friend offered to help the women— my sister, my dad’s widow, and I— with this. I had met her just shortly before and felt her sincerity and warmth, and had let her and her husband know that this was my first time sitting shiva.

Shiva— the name of a set of practices that is gifted to those seven closest family relations after a loved one’s death: mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, spouse.

I knew about Kriya, but didn’t know how it was done. The family was all led to a back room, and the rabbi’s wife was handed a scissors and gently—with my eyes granting permission— she cut the top of my black shirt. Then I was to take that cut fabric and rend it apart with the consciousness of grieving. Then a blessing.

(Because this cemetery was operated by more observant Jews, the rabbi’s wife was then given a safety pin to close up the place where my torn shirt revealed my clavicle. The clavicle of a woman is considered, by some very observant Jews, inappropriate to be seen by a man who is not your husband.)

As the oldest daughter present, I was guided through this ritual first, then my younger sister, and then my dad’s widow. For each the same process: the rabbi’s wife cut the shirt or top of the dress, then the mourner tears it several inches reciting a blessing, then a safety pin.

My brother was then led out to the main room and in front of all the men and women present, as well as the livestream video camera, had this practice done to him. For him, no safety pins involved.

(I will never probably stop rolling my eyes about the ways that women are hidden and men are strutted in my people’s tradition.)

Then we were back being greeted in the main room by those who arrived for my dad’s funeral, some Israeli and some Americans who had flown in for the holy days of Sukkot and then found out about this, so they came. Alternately, my siblings and I took breaks in the family room, where we could be unseen and unneeded for a moment.

—

When I was back in the main room with the wooden benches, the funeral director walked over to me and my family, and asked us to step into the family room again, just through the doorway. Inside, he said someone needed to identify my dad’s body.

It was the next tiny ritual in the sea of hundreds of tiny rituals that had accompanied us and guided us from the morning when it was determined it was time to remove my dad from the ventilator, ECMO and dialysis and let him breathe his own final breath.

My dad’s widow and my younger sister both offered to do the identification. I have seen and tended to many dead bodies in the morgue while I was a chaplain resident, but I didn’t need to see my dad’s.

But somehow the flow of time changed. Without any announcement, we shifted from linear, decision-making, clear time to unbounded, everpresent, nowhere to go but here. Kronos to Kairos— and I wasn’t totally ready but then I was in it and you don’t even know to want something else.

My father’s body wrapped in a burial shroud and then wrapped in a tallit— the traditional off white prayer shawl with black stripes— was rolled or pushed in on a table or stretcher and his face was being uncovered, while my brother and I were also standing there.

My younger sister had wanted a private moment with him during this time, but we were outside of the time of preferences, and inside the time of ritual. The director in harsh hebrew indicated, it was here, in front of everyone, now. And he gently unwrapped the tallit from my father’s face.

His face the last time I had seen him in the hospital had looked erect, taught, struggling with eyes frozen open. The nurses kept adding liquid to keep them moist. It was very possible he was in pain, even a lot of it then.

We didn’t know that until hours before we removed from the machines: ECMO, ventilator, and dialysis. He had gone into cardiac arrest the week before and it had taken 20 minutes to restart his heart. (That we were not notified about this still hurts and surprises and angers me.) But he never came back from that.

Now his face was a grey-purple, and his eyes purpled in that way that refrigeration causes, and I was relieved to see his eyes mostly closed. Though from the angle where I was standing, I saw the dimmed whites of his eyes gently peeking out.

I don’t remember the next moment. I know there was that silence that accompanies the sanctity of the dying and dead. I think there was also a collective gasp, an inner aligning of the new data points.

Then I closed my eyes.

That day had involved a long morning of walking one foot in the tending of the logistics of the funeral and one foot walking as a grieving daughter being guided by one of my dad’s closest Rabbi friends in the ways of observant Jewish mourning and burying the dead.

My eyes stayed closed.

Somewhere inside there was just my wild free heart that didn’t want to be managing or abiding by anything. I just wanted to be.

I lost my bearing.

I didn’t yet have a way to see how each tiny ritual in the sea of rituals was supporting me to move from one moment to the next moment in the most ancient of holy practices— the living tending to the dying.

I disappeared in tears.