“I have failed to honor her memory,” Cynthia said. “I have forgotten her birthday as well as her death day and again tried to avoid the experience of grief.” I notice the passing of our mom’s birthday every August and of her death day each November. But my problem, like my sister’s, is that I’ve never done anything about it—or never done anything about it in a way that seemed to matter, or to ease the enduring sense of loss.

One of the things I have always done is to recall the week leading up to my mother’s death, which I used to think of as one woman’s terrible Passion. (I am a Jew, but I was baptized, raised, and confirmed as an Episcopalian.) She went into the hospital for some regular tests on a Tuesday; they kept her an extra day for more tests; that became two more days, then three. The doctors had known that the breast cancer that had resulted in two separate mastectomies, plus countless rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, had been attacking her liver; that week they discovered that it had spread to her whole body. By the time we came to visit her that weekend, she was so doped up on painkillers she could barely speak. She died of a morphine-induced heart attack just past midnight on Monday, Nov. 9, 1987. One of my father’s sisters, the only person present at her death, said she arched up her torso—as if she was being electrocuted, or fighting off her killer one last time—then collapsed.

When I still lived in Andover, Mass., the town where I grew up, there were a few late nights when I ran through this awful timeline in the graveyard behind the church we’d belonged to. There was a dead patch of earth near the church, right where the graveyard started, that seemed like it had to be the spot where we’d dug a hole right after her funeral and spaded in a portion of her ashes. This was spontaneous, improvised mourning, which, in its way, is as important as ritual and ritualized prayer.

But sometimes, without ritual and ritualized prayer, the grief never completely has a place to go—and like a cancer, it can metastasize, taking over your whole life.

***

Like many gerim—Jews by choice, or proselytes—I joined the tribe for love. “Most converts discover Judaism as a result of falling in love with a Jew,” writes Anita Diamant in her book Choosing a Jewish Life. “Others find their way through friendships, college courses, and coincidences that, at some point, begin to seem more like signposts than accidents.” I had the good fortune of both paths; I fell in love with a beautiful and brilliant Jewish woman whom I reconnected with 16 years after we’d been friends in college, a girl I’d had a crush on when I was a sophomore and she was a junior. And like most who convert for love, I’ve also subsequently fallen for the awesome beauty of Jewish practice, tradition, and ritual. Just the idea of a yahrzeit, the practice of honoring a loved one’s memory on the anniversary of his or her death, gives me solace.

But can I honor my mother’s yahrzeit? Can I even refer to the anniversary of a Christian’s death as a yahrzeit? My mother, Ann, grew up in Tennessee and was raised Southern Baptist; after college, she spent a year studying at Vanderbilt University’s divinity school before moving to New England to teach English at a boarding school. (That’s where she met my father, John; he was the head of the school’s English department.) When my sister and I were still little, my mother converted to Episcopalianism, my father’s denomination. She took her faith seriously. In the work she did for our church, she would bring the Eucharist to the homes of members who were physically unable to make it to services. In her battle with cancer, she also grew in her spiritual thinking beyond the traditional boundaries of Protestantism and into the realm of the holistic, pluralist, Eastern-influenced, and New Age. (She was a brave woman. Not many Western doctors in the 1980s considered a macrobiotic diet, meditation, and visualization techniques to be at all useful; the very idea of complementary therapies barely existed.) I can’t ever know for sure what she would think of me being a Jew. I hope that she wouldn’t think of my saying kaddish for her as offensive, a microcosmic analogue to overzealous Mormons posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims.

What my mother might think, though, hasn’t been my only worry. In Judaism, there are degrees of honorifics for the dead; we say “may her memory be for blessing,” but we also say “may the memory of the righteous be for blessing” for a deceased rabbi, or “may the memory of the saintly be for blessing” for a martyr. I was concerned: If the honorifics climbed upward, depending on the degree of respect traditionally accorded to the dead, did the spectrum implicitly go in the other direction as well? In other words, if the baseline of honor for a dead Jew is “may her memory be for blessing,” then when remembering a gentile, is her memory for naught?

Jews in the Reform tradition are sometimes perceived as winging it, making it up as we go along. And sometimes, certainly, we do. I know a fellow ger whose mikveh was not in an Orthodox-owned, Upper West Side indoor pool, as mine was, but in an actual river; a Jewish neighbor lights candles for her deceased parents on their birthdays. And I know plenty of Jews, from many different backgrounds, who either don’t keep kosher or who do so in an interpretive fashion. But the Reform Jewish tradition is still a tradition, and the tradition has a clear response to the question of whether or not you can say kaddish for a Christian: Yes.

Continue reading: ‘Kaddish for Apostates and Gentiles’

My father died of cancer in Miami Beach, where I’d grown up. My fiancé, Jonathan, and I flew down from New York, where we lived, early the next day. My sister and I were aware of the imperative for a quick burial, and we scheduled the funeral for Tuesday, Sept. 11, in Florida. The burial would then take place on Wednesday, back in New York, in a plot on Long Island belonging to my father’s new wife.

I was in my childhood bed, finishing a restless night’s sleep, when the phone woke me on Tuesday morning. It was my mother. Long divorced from my father, she had decided against attending the funeral and was on her way to work in Miami, her car radio tuned to the news. “I think you should turn on the TV,” she said, a strange sound to her voice. My immediate, nonsensical assumption was that a televised tribute to my dad, a well-loved doctor in our community, was about to air.

Instead I found the unimaginable horror that was devastating New York, my adopted city. I kept the TV on as the second plane hit and the towers fell. But the funeral was approaching, so while I watched I also struggled to finish writing the eulogy I would deliver, even as I wondered whether people would still show up for a funeral on a day like this.

The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people that morning. But millions more disruptions rippled through the world that day, large and small. For those of us who experienced them, the events of our individual lives have remained caught up with this global tragedy.

For my family, the immediate practical effect of the attacks was that we would not bury my father in New York on Wednesday. I later learned that there is a Hebrew word, aninut, that describes the time between death and burial. The person mourning during aninut, the onen, is supposed to focus his or her attention exclusively on the deceased during what is typically a very brief period. Immediately upon learning of my father’s death, I had done just that, busying myself with the tasks that death necessitates: helping to plan the funeral and select a casket, notifying friends and family, and arranging for Andy Bachman, the Brooklyn rabbi who’d be marrying Jonathan and me, to preside at the burial. But when we couldn’t bury my father, I found myself in a suspended state.

I’m not particularly religious, but as happens to some nonobservant people, at the big moments in life my religious impulses have kicked in. My father didn’t have much use for religion, but he mentioned God more times during his brief illness than I can remember in all my years before. Judaism provided us, helpfully, with a script to follow in the immediate aftermath of his death—from the details of the funeral to the timing of the burial—and with each passing day I felt more keenly that our forced abandonment of that script, in addition to everything else that it was, was distinctly un-Jewish. “This isn’t how we’re supposed to do things,” I found myself thinking.

***

My father’s Miami funeral on Tuesday was well-attended, and if the assemblage appeared somewhat dazed, the service, apart from one eulogy that spoke of the morning’s astonishing developments, remained focused on the task at hand. When the rabbi who presided at the funeral met privately with family members, he mentioned, along with other instructions, that it was OK to attend celebrations in the coming months, explaining that in Jewish teaching, if a funeral procession meets a wedding procession at a crossroads, the wedding procession has the right of way. The rabbi was a stranger to me—I’d met him only once before, at my father’s wedding that spring—and he was unaware when he spoke to us that my own wedding date was four weeks away. At the time I couldn’t think of my wedding, but his words would later carry weight.

The following day, the group that was supposed to reconvene on Long Island for the burial began to unravel and disperse. With air traffic still grounded, my father’s two brothers, his best friend, and their wives rented a van and began the long journey north toward their homes in Virginia and New Jersey. A couple of days later, Jonathan boarded one of the first flights out of South Florida to get to Cape Cod for the weekend wedding of a close friend. I stayed on at my mom’s, the house in which I’d grown up, seeking comfort in familiar surroundings. I curled up with the phone talking to friends in New York. Every morning, my sister, who lives with her husband and children nearby, called the funeral home to see if there were updates on when our father’s body could be transported north.

I was feeling more and more unsettled. The hours had to be filled, so when I wasn’t anxiously reading the newspaper or watching the news, I played with my young nieces, walked on the beach, helped with dinner. But enjoying the prerogatives of the living felt increasingly, almost perversely, inappropriate. I couldn’t avoid dwelling on my father’s body, imagining it alone, unattended in a freezer. As the days ticked by, one thought continued to reassert itself: “We have to get him into the ground.”

Only recently did I look into the reasons behind the Jewish tradition of rapid burial. One interpretation, that there is mercy in bringing the soul closure in its relationship to the body, provided me a spiritual understanding for the disquiet I experienced that awful week, for the creeping feeling, as each day went by, that we were failing my father.

My sister, brother-in-law, and I finally made it to New York on Sunday, Sept. 16, a week after my father’s death and two days after what would have been his 62nd birthday. We walked through an eerily empty Miami airport, boarded an eerily empty plane, and saw the smoke rising from ground zero as we landed. On Monday, surrounded by friends and relatives, buoyed by the wise and compassionate words of Rabbi Bachman, we at last buried my father.

“I’m glad we’re all going to be together again soon for a happy occasion,” my uncle said to me then, taking for granted that Jonathan and I would proceed with our wedding. Jonathan and I had talked about it and decided not to change our plans, taking to heart the principle that a wedding procession has right of way. My uncle’s certainty helped convince me that we had made the right decision. We were married in October.

Strangely enough, getting married so soon after my father died—and having a New York wedding so soon after the attacks—seemed to satisfy a hunger for connection that so many of us had. It felt somehow hopeful. Though the wedding was a joyous, cathartic event, the sorrow and anxiety palpable in the city throughout the fall matched my own deepening despair. Looking back, I don’t think I could have managed it if the wedding had been scheduled to take place several months after my father’s death; by the winter my grief was cresting.

On Sept. 11, my sister had said to me, “Dad died and now the whole world is falling apart.” I understood. In our bubble of grief, it somehow made sense: Without our father, how could the world possibly remain as it was? As friends have inevitably lost loved ones since, I’ve wondered what it must be like for them to mourn among people unweighted by mourning. Being a New Yorker in the fall of 2001 made me feel less lonely in my grief.

Barbara Spindel is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Time Out New York, the Daily Beast, Salon, Details, Spin, and other publications.

• Around the country, there is a renewed emphasis on strictly observing Jewish burial practices. [NYT]

• Kissinger’s response to the “gas chambers” remark is something less even than a non-apology apology. The quotations “must be viewed in the context of the time,” he said. [JTA]

• Jack Abramoff’s pizza-making days are over. Which is a shame, because he was apparently good at it! [AP]

• You’re not going to believe this, but, according to statistics, pseudo-Jew Amar’e Stoudemire plays better than average during Hanukkah. [Alone in the Green Room]

• Should Jews own Christmas trees? (#slatepitches.) Contributing editor Mark Oppenheimer debates. [Slate]

Leon Wieseltier remembers] Holbrooke, as does Hendrik Hertzberg. Below: Warren Zevon’s “The Envoy.”

The objection grew from the Talmud’s interpretation of the biblical imperative for a speedy burial, first spelled out in Deuteronomy, where it states that a hanged man “shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt surely bury him the same day.” Not only must he be buried within 24 hours of death, according to the tractate Sanhedrin, but there can be no “disfigurement of the body as a result of postmortem dissection.” In other words, Jewish law mandates that the body, whenever possible, should be kept whole. An autopsy—with its incisions and tissue extractions, preservations and excisions—violates that mandate.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that the number of autopsies performed annually in this country has fallen in recent decades, but these post-mortem examinations are still conducted regularly. For states where medical examiners govern autopsy procedure, the Model Post-Mortem Examination Act (adopted in 1954) mandates that those who die in a suspicious manner—by suicide, homicide, accident, or undetermined cause—must undergo an autopsy, yet this legal requirement brushes up against religious obligations.

New York City, which has the largest and most active medical examiner’s offices in the country (and where I interned during the summer of 2002), has procedures in place when a religious objection to autopsy is raised. (Jews aren’t the only group to raise such objections; the Amish, Hmong, and many Muslims also try to avoid the procedure.) Instead of conducting the standard post-mortem, with the entire body exposed under bright lights and completely dissected, forensic pathologists perform what they term as “minimally invasive autopsy,” wrapping the body in a white shroud and dissecting only where it’s absolutely necessary. If a body has come in with neck trauma, for example, a neck dissection is necessary to distinguish between suicide by hanging or strangulation at the hands of another.

Other parts of the country are catching on to ways of coping with religious concerns about autopsies. In December 2008, David Fowler, Maryland’s chief medical examiner, met with a delegation of Orthodox rabbis and other local ethnic community leaders to review the state’s autopsy guidelines. “Up until then, there was no accommodation in the state law for religious objections to autopsy,” said Rabbi Ariel Sadwin, who was at the meeting and is Maryland director for Agudath Israel, the national network of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communal organizations. “Cases went straight to the medical examiner without considering the needs of the Jewish community to respect the dead and keep organs and tissues intact.” As a result of the meeting, the state has committed to working harder to familiarize pathologists with Jewish protocols.

After Liviu Librescu, an engineering professor and Holocaust survivor, was killed in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre in Blacksburg, his ultra-Orthodox family faced a problem. The city had a small Jewish community with no permanent rabbi, and the family, specifically his son in Israel, worried that an autopsy of Librescu’s body would violate Jewish law. The task of asking the State of Virginia to release Librescu’s body as quickly as possible and forgo a full autopsy fell to Rabbi Isaac Lieder, the Chabad leader in the capital of Richmond. The medical examiner’s office allowed Librescu’s body to undergo a minimally invasive autopsy (specifically, removing bullets and performing x-ray procedures) as an alternative, and Librescu was eventually buried in Israel.

Developments in medico-legal technology now allow pathologists to perform “virtual autopsies” as an alternative to traditional, invasive ones. In a virtual autopsy, pathologists use CT scans and MRIs to ascertain details about the insides of a cadaver. Three-dimensional visualizations, many of which are breathtaking, can approximate the body’s condition, allowing coroners to determine the cause and manner of death without making a single incision. It’s also cheaper: the cost of an autopsy runs between $4,000 and $5,000, while a virtual autopsy costs five times less.

Around the world—in Britain, New Zealand, Israel, and elsewhere—virtual autopsies are becoming more commonplace and increasingly accepted by religious leaders since they are considered to be halachically okay. “As long as the integrity of the body stays intact and is not violated, there’s no problem,” said Moshe Tendler, a professor of bioethics at Yeshiva University. (Tendler added that he was one of the first rabbis to advocate for the use of a CT scan as a substitute for autopsy when a rabbinical colleague was killed in a traffic accident.) The drawback to a virtual autopsy is that current technology for conducting it can only approximate the full spectrum of what a traditional autopsy uncovers, especially with respect to microscopic analysis. But as medical researchers and pathologists refine their methodologies and improve their equipment, even that hurdle could soon be overcome.

Sarah Weinman writes monthly online crime fiction columns for the Los Angeles Times and the Barnes & Noble Review and contributes to the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and New Hampshire Public Radio’s “Word of Mouth.”

In other crisis-of-the-dead news, Israel is running out of space for the dearly departed, leading officials to consider “high-density burials” in which bodies are “laid to rest on top of each other in underground crypts.” Perhaps they got the idea from Mrs. Marmor.

With Demise of Jewish Burial Societies, Resting Places Are in Turmoil [NYT]
Israel Faces Grave Outlook for Burial Space [Reuters]

The next thing that happened was my other sister arrived, and then Eric’s wife. We stood outside with my father, and talked about what to do next. We walked in small circles around each other like pigeons, moving from one to the other hoping someone would take control. And then my brother’s wife, now a widow, said that Eric had wanted to be cremated. This was all we needed to know. This gave us a direction of where to go next. We gave over to her request assuming not only that she would be the one who would know what Eric wanted, but that as his wife, she should be the one to decide. And we were, for a moment, glad. None of us knew what else to do. I looked at my father and felt relieved that he would be free of the obligation of deciding how to bury his own son.

While we were all in shock, none of us were really surprised that Eric took his own life. Even as a young man he was obsessed with the idea, once even getting literature from the Hemlock Society. It was as if he kept suicide in his back pocket like a pamphlet on a possible way out. It wasn’t until the last years of his life that I knew how sick he had become, how hopelessness and regret had colored everything for him. That he wanted to be cremated seemed a part of this desire to take himself out of the world completely.

After the memorial service, performed by a Reform rabbi, we had nothing left to do. There would be no gathering at a cemetery, no discussion of what his headstone should say. My mother was buried in a Jewish cemetery, one in which cremains are not allowed. He couldn’t be buried near her.

Jewish law itself is not always clear on why cremation is prohibited. Deuteronomy states that even a criminal should not be left to hang from a tree for the carrion feeders, but should be buried right away. The rabbinical tradition invokes respect for the body, for the entire world; to burn the body is an act of violence against God’s creation. For his part, Maimonides wrote in his 13 principles of faith, that “that the dead will be brought back to life.” Since ashes do not a body make, those who have been cremated cannot be resurrected when God decides to raise up the dead. Given the association between cremation and Nazi death camps, many Jews cannot fathom any reason a Jew would ever choose such an option. And while more liberal schools of Jewish thought will allow the burial of cremains, there is still unease that winds its way through much of the commentary on the subject.

Sometime after the memorial service, Eric’s wife scattered his ashes on a beach 25 miles from our home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Just as he had wanted, there is nothing left.

But now there is nothing left to mourn, either.

Is this then, the reason for the Jewish prohibition against cremation? That without the body, shrouded and placed in a simple wooden box, no headstone, and no burial mound, we are without the tactile sensation that so much of Jewish ritual insists on? Observant Jews bind their head and arms with phylacteries and on holy days, even Reform Jews can be seen touching their prayer books to the Torah as it makes its rounds through the congregation. We thump our chests on Yom Kippur and shake our lulavs on Sukkot. We salt our water on Passover, and extinguish our Havdalah candles with a satisfying pshhhh at the end of the Sabbath. When we mourn, we rend our garments, sit on low stools, and clutch the dirt with our hands to throw on the casket before it is lowered into the ground.

The one thing I knew I would miss most of all, is the placing of a pebble or rock on the headstone as a reminder…to who? To God, to ourselves, to the universe that we were there and that we remember. What was there now for me, for any of my family, to do with our trembling, impatient hands?

A few days after Eric’s service we went to his house and his wife distributed items that she thought each of us would want. I took some toy cars my brother collected and a non-stick frying pan, things we use all the time now without a thought. I can remember Eric by these things, but they will never be a memorial to him. They are the detritus of a life, more stuff to add to the pile of my own.

Suicide is a crushing blow to those who survive. I am still angry at my brother, despite my understanding that he was sick. I am angrier still at myself that I did not ask to keep a part of him, if even a few grains of his ashes. My brother’s death took him from me, but now it’s as if he never existed. There is nothing left.

Then, earlier this fall, I had an idea to go to a beach on the north shore of Boston where his ashes were scattered. I wanted to collect some of the sand, place it in a jar, and set it on a shelf in my house. It’s possible there is still some of him still there in that sand, if only in a single grain. It might be enough to remind me that he once was really here.

My father picked me up from the train station and together we drove out to what is called a shingle beach, mostly rock with little sand. This was my brother’s favorite place, Winter Island, where a barrack that was used for aircraft during World War II still stands. I had hurt my leg the day before, and my father is arthritic, so together we shuffled and limped down the rocky shore. We stopped at an open area littered with broken clam shells, the remains of the hard work of the gulls that drop the clams from a great height so that they shatter, revealing the moist prize inside. I looked out over the water. My father and I had the same conversation we always have when talking about Eric. How we were shocked at the manner of his death, but not surprised. How despite all his regret and depression, that there was so much good in Eric’s life and why couldn’t he see it? But we talked as if on autopilot, as if we were obliged to say something when in fact there was nothing at all to say.

So I bent down and gathered the pebbly sand and imagined that some part of him was here. But then, as I took in the beauty of the beach—the huge gulls, the small abandoned lighthouse, the calm green water—I understood finally that this very place is Eric’s graveyard. The rocks are his headstone, the marks of the shells on the sand the engraving on the marble that read that he was born and he died. Eric was buried here.

I still took some of the sand home to keep, along with a handful of shells I gave to my son. But soon, I will take him to this beach and we will toss handfuls of pebbles into the ocean. I can even say Kaddish here, because although there is nothing left of Eric that will turn slowly to dust over time, this whole beach is where he remains, as long as there is sand and rock and shell.