I, my father, and three siblings had always expected her to live if not forever, at least until 95, because she was fit as a fiddle and radiated good health, but a glioblastoma not only takes no prisoners, one cannot even talk back. It was a precipitous and swift decline into total madness and physical destruction. So, when the telephone call came after the Sabbath, it was no surprise.

My father asked me to give one of the eulogies—something I dreaded, but also relished. It was a chance to try to explain to the world who my mother was and who we were to each other. My relationship with my mother was pure pixie dust. We loved each other and were enormously attached. There was even a secret, unwritten agreement between us: We would never separate. We would always be attached. This agreement, forged in the magical, totally irrational mists of early childhood, served a neurotic purpose for both of us. Neither of us would ever be abandoned, something we feared was worse than death. This took the form of her knowing wherever I was at all times and the same for me. And we played these silly games well past life’s midway marks. I would check in with her at least every other day and, when traveling, more often.

“So, where are you now?” my mother would ask.

“In Newark,” was my answer—or Chicago, or Detroit, or Jerusalem, depending on where I actually was.

“How did you get there?”

“By bicycle,” I would tell her.

“Was it safe?” she would invariably ask.

“Not really.”

“But you will be careful.”

“Yes.”

“You will call me when you get home?”

“Yes,” I said.

For my mother’s part she would announce to me when she was leaving and returning, when she was about to get onto a plane, train, or automobile. A second dispatch would come when she arrived at her destination. This was one of the rhythms of our connection. Of course this was the cover for much more profound longings, fears, anxieties, and wishes.

Her funeral was beautiful. The rabbis of the generation were present. Decidedly of the old world, they sang us lullabies of sadness and Jewish lament. They had that trademark nod of the head, the Yiddish-inflected tones and soothing cadence, mouths filled with sweetness of the Talmud. Thanks to these beautiful men, my tears flowed easily and naturally.

And then there was the shiva.

By tradition, Jewish mourners will sit in a low chair and around them sit the comforters, loved ones, friends, relatives, and neighbors. The door is wide open, and one must expect all kinds—the graceful, the wise, the well-meaning, and the clumsy. At my mother’s shiva, wave after wave of august personages came, lights of the Jewish world, friends and acquaintances from 70 years ago and from yesterday. Some of the shiva dialogue went like this:

“Was she sick?”

“Yes, very,” I’d answer.

“Did she suffer?”

“Yes.”

“Well, of course, she had a brain cancer. But was she in a lot of pain?”

“Afraid so,” I said.

“Horrible.”

“Afraid so.”

“Was she lucid? Did she know?”

“Afraid so.”

Other conversations were far deeper. One man, the father of an old friend of mine, spoke to me in a hushed sideways manner, cheek-to-cheek. I forget how it came down, but somehow we drifted toward the tender, intimate, and philosophical.

“Death is a perverse miracle in a way,” I said. “The slow shutdown of the organs, in contrast to the gradual development of them in the beginning of life.”

“They are equally miraculous, and equally divine,” he said. “But we cry only about one, never about the other.” He had lost a teenage son in a fire not that many years before. We held hands a brief moment before he left the mourners’ house.

Some pay a shiva call out of respect for the departed or for the family, to worship at a shrine, others out of love, or to relive their own sadness and loss, hoping desperately to locate themselves in the solar system of sorrow.

In my mother’s case, all this was true, but to an even greater extent. People she had been young with came from all across the country, and people who I had been young with came from everywhere—from the Midwest, the West coast, and the South. Some looked wonderful. Others had aged drastically, arriving with walkers and in wheelchairs. I had aged radically too. The bell tolls for all.

Why had they come? “I felt I had to” was often the reply. But in retelling my mother’s history and her core beliefs—a child of war-time London, a daughter of Hassidic parents, a beautiful and modest woman—the puzzle of her life did yield new clues. I particularly enjoyed this one: In 1974 upon Richard Nixon’s resignation there was a now iconic photo taken of the disgraced president standing on the tarmac flashing a V-sign for victory while standing next to his wife Pat. The scene flashed across television screens all over the globe: The president of the world’s greatest superpower quits office—a first. My mother’s reaction? “Look, look at Pat Nixon,” she said to me, as she folded laundry. Mrs. Nixon was wearing a long-sleeved dress, despite the oppressive August heat in Washington. “She is dressed like a rabbi’s wife.”

***

On the last day of the shiva, we locked the front door of the house and turned well-wishers away. We gathered around my father in a complete circle, sons, daughters, and children-in-law. “Tell us what is on your mind, Dad. Say anything and everything.”

At first, he halted. A lifetime of rabbinic restraint and modesty and sensitivity to others is always at work. But we could see the truth: He was alone now and afraid. He who had taken care of us, was now weakened and in need—and petrified of becoming a burden. We assured him that burden is not bad. That this was the way of the world, we told him, something that cannot always be avoided. He protested this idea. It was as if he thought that by some enchanted, ennobled purpose, he was not permitted to become what others become.

Then he began to cry. He had his own secret promise, made to his own mother whose spirit visits him in troubled and wonderful times. That he would always provide; always give and never take. This is how he took care of my mother: like a soldier-saint, vigorously protecting, a muscular yet nurturing presence without complaint. Now he wept and wept and we mourners—now comforters—watched in silence.

And then, in the spirit of our mother, we extracted from our father a promise that he would never die. And we solemnly swore the same to him in return.

The riddle of him and her, mother and father, our joys our sorrows, our family idiosyncrasies, our ways with money, faith, and love, had yielded fresh clues, even some clarity. Shiva was now over. We gathered our belongings and left my mother’s house.

The doctors said there were several options this time. We could do nothing and my father would die in a few weeks. He could undergo chemotherapy, and if it worked it would give him another few months. They could give him radiation treatment, but the chances were that that would hurt more than it would help. Or they could operate and remove his tongue and his larynx. It was a complicated surgery that would take more than 10 hours, and, considering my father’s advanced age, the doctors didn’t think it was a viable option. But my dad liked the idea. “At my age, I don’t need a tongue anymore, just eyes in my head and a heart that beats,” he told the young oncologist. “The worst that can happen is that instead of telling you how pretty you are, I’ll write it down.”

The doctor blushed. “It’s not just the speech, it’s the trauma of the operation,” she said. “It’s the suffering and the rehabilitation if you survive it. We’re talking here about an enormous blow to your quality of life.”

“I love life,” my dad gave her his obstinate smile. “If the quality is good, then great. If not, then not. I’m not picky.”

In the taxi on our way back from the hospital my dad held my hand as if I were 5 years old again and we were about to cross a busy street. He was talking excitedly about the various treatment options, like an entrepreneur discussing new business opportunities. My dad is a businessman. Not a tycoon in a three-piece suit, just a regular guy who likes to buy and sell, and, if he can’t buy or sell, he’s ready to lease or rent. For him business is a way to meet people, to communicate, to get a little action going. Just let him buy a pack of cigarettes at some kiosk, and within 10 minutes he’s talking to the guy behind the counter about a possible partnership. “We’re really in an ideal situation here,” he said, totally seriously, as he stroked my hand. “I love making decisions when things are at rock bottom. And the situation is such dreck now that I can only come out ahead: With the chemo, I’ll die in no time at all; with the radiation, I’ll get gangrene of the jaw; and everyone’s sure I won’t survive the operation because I’m 84. You know how many plots of land I bought like that? When the owner doesn’t want to sell, and I don’t have a penny in my pocket?”

“I know,” I said. And I really do.

When I was 7, we moved. Our old apartment had been on the same street, and we’d all loved it, but my dad insisted that we move to a larger place. During World War II, my dad, his parents, and some other people hid in a hole in the ground in a Polish town for almost 600 days. The hole was so small that they couldn’t stand or lie down in it, only sit. When the Russians liberated the area, they had to carry my father and my grandparents out, because they couldn’t move on their own. Their muscles had atrophied. That time he spent in the hole had made him sensitive about privacy. The fact that my brother, sister, and I were growing up in the same room drove him crazy. He wanted us to move to an apartment where we would all have our own rooms. We kids actually liked sharing a bedroom, but when my dad makes up his mind, there’s no changing it.

One Saturday a few weeks before we were supposed to leave our old apartment, which he’d already sold, my dad took us to see our new place. We all showered and put on our nicest clothes, even though we knew we weren’t going to see anyone there. But still, it isn’t every day that you move to a new apartment.

Though the building was finished, no one lived in it yet. After dad made sure we were all in the elevator, he pressed the button for the fifth floor. That building was one of the only ones in the neighborhood that had an elevator, and the short ride itself thrilled us. Dad opened the reinforced steel door to the new apartment and began to show us the rooms. First the kids’ rooms, then the master bedroom, and finally the living room and the huge balcony. The view was amazing and all of us, especially my dad, were enchanted by the magical palace that would be our new home.

“Have you ever seen such a view?” he hugged my mom and pointed to the green hill visible from the living room window.

“No,” my mom replied unenthusiastically.

“Then why the sour look?” my dad asked.

“Because there’s no floor,” my mom whispered and looked down at the dirt and exposed metal pipes under our feet. Only then did I look down and see, along with my brother and sister, what my mother saw. I mean, we’d all seen earlier that there was no floor, but somehow, with all my dad’s excitement and enthusiasm, we hadn’t paid much attention to that fact. My dad looked down now too.

“Sorry,” he said. “There was no money left.”

“After we move, I’ll have to wash the floor,” my mom said in her most ordinary voice. “I know how to wash tiles, not sand.”

“You’re right,” my dad said and tried to hug her.

“The fact that I’m right won’t help me clean the house,” she said.

“OK, OK,” my dad said. “If you stop talking about it and give me a minute’s quiet, I’ll think of something. You know that, right?” My mother nodded unconvincingly. The elevator ride down was less happy.

When we moved into the new apartment a few weeks later, the floors were completely covered in ceramic tiles, a different color in each room. In the socialist Israel of the early 1970s, there was only one kind of tile—the color of sesame—and the colored floors in our apartment—reds, blacks, and browns—was different from anything we’d ever seen.

“You see?” my dad kissed my mother on the forehead proudly. “I told you I’d think of something.”

Only a month later did we discover exactly what he’d thought of. I was alone at home taking a shower that day when a gray-haired man wearing a white button-down shirt came into the bathroom with a young couple. “These are our Volcano Red tiles. Direct from Italy,” he said, pointing to the floor. The woman was the first to notice me, naked and soaped up, staring at them. The three of them quickly apologized and left the bathroom.

That evening at dinner, when I told everyone what had happened, my dad revealed his secret. Since he hadn’t had the money to pay for floor tiles, he’d made a deal with the ceramics company: They would give us the tiles for free, and my dad would let them use our place as a model apartment.

The taxi had already reached my parents’ building, and when we got out, my dad was still holding my hand. “This is exactly how I like to make decisions, when there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain,” he repeated. When we opened the apartment door, we were greeted by a pleasant, familiar smell, hundreds of colored floor tiles, and a single powerful hope. Who knows? Maybe this time, too, life and my father will surprise us with another unexpected deal.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

“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 loved Mahler’s emotionalism and range. He loved Mahler’s passion for atypical instruments: harmonium, glockenspiel, mandolin. He loved the way the symphonies incorporate snippets of bird sounds, unpretentious folk music, and Jewish ritual melodies. He loved the humor and intensity he found in Mahler’s work. Mahler’s music messes with people’s heads—the guy was a terribly polarizing figure, much like my father. Dad was a psychiatrist and enfant terrible who ran a community mental health center; he loved working with the mentally ill and loved teasing people who expected him to be a formal, cerebral figure. It delighted him that Mahler had visited Sigmund Freud, who wrote that he admired “the capability for psychological understanding of this man of genius.”

In Mahler Remembered, Norman Lebrecht quotes the 19th-century German conductor Oskar Fried on the composer:

He was a God-seeker. With incredible fanaticism, with unparalleled dedication and with unshakable love he persued a constant search for the divine, both in the individual and in man as a whole. He saw himself bearing a sacred trust; it suffused his whole being. His nature was religious thorough and through in a mystical, not a dogmatic, sense.

Mahler felt a strong connection to the Jewish faith of his childhood, yet converted to Catholicism to qualify for a job at the Vienna Court Opera. (He told a friend that the decision had “cost me a great deal.”) My father, too, felt powerfully drawn to Judaism but not to dogma; he had little interest in rules of any kind. He could chant Torah and daven like nobody’s business, but he delighted in what he called “glatt trayf.”

More than anything else, what I think drew my father to Mahler was the composer’s obsession with death. My dad had nearly died of polio at 9. At 15, he watched his own father have a heart attack in a living room chair and die in front of him. My father had his own heart attack at 39, and he barely recovered from experimental heart surgery at 56, in 1996. Mahler had a weak heart too. Both men were both convinced they would die young. Both were right. Mahler died in 1911, at 51; my dad in 2004, at 64.

The subject of the shadow of death brings me to the Rosh Hashanah connection. My father was famous in our shul for his Torah reading on the second day of the holiday—the binding of Isaac. When I was a teenager, dad’s rendition was a symphony of mortification for me. He’d do dramatically different voices for Abraham (tentative, confused), Isaac (weak, small) and God (really freaking loud). When he got to the moment of truth in the text, he’d slowly raise the Torah pointer in the air as if to plunge it into the scroll, or into Isaac’s bound body. I wanted to die. Today I find this awesome and Mahlerian. I would give anything to be able to hear it again.

The High Holidays are a good time to ponder not just how we’d choose to be different in the coming year, but also the impact of loss and the need to reach out to people on earth while we still can. As a teenager and a twentysomething, I was frequently embarrassed by my dad’s flamboyance and sappiness. The man had no filter. Because he was aware that he could die at any time, he was quick to tell my brother and me how proud he was of us and how much he loved us. (Every time he turned sentimental and beatific, I called him “The Moonie.” He just laughed.) My dad was also inappropriate a lot—he once gave a non-Jewish guest at our Passover Seder a “Crucifixion Barbie” he’d made, complete with stigmata (red nail polish) and a Popsicle-stick cross. He was no angel.

At this time of year, when we ponder the kind of person we want to be in the future, I admire my dad’s authenticity, precisely the quality that embarrassed me about him when I was young. Now I want to emulate it. I spend a lot of time being anxious about what people will think of me. I worry about the embarrassment of failing. But my dad didn’t care.

I also think about conveying my passions to my kids. I remember my dad’s delight when I emailed him from California in 1997, telling him I was thinking about going to a San Francisco Symphony performance of Mahler’s Second. I still have his emailed response:

This is the piece I joined the Boston Pro Musica to sing last year. This is the piece that has haunted me since I was 10. This is the ‘Resurrection.’ When I sang this piece in May, 1996, The Malachamovess was floating on his scrawny horse in front of the second balcony, and I looked him in his eye socket and said, ‘Listen to me, you motherfucker, listen to what I can sing!’ And he rode off in defeat. When you hear this piece, it will change your view of classical music.

My father especially loved the Second’s finale:

Aufersteh’n, ja aufershteh’n
Mein herz, Mein herz in einem nu,
Sterben werd ich um zu leben!
Sterben werd ich um zu leben!

In English, that’s:

Rise again, yes, rise again,
Will you, my heart, in an instant!
Die shall I in order to live.

Is it too much to think of the parallels between this piece and the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah? Isaac and Abraham didn’t experience a literal resurrection, but they did leave that hillside with new lives. They’d faced death and loss. They’d seen the power and terror and confusing mercy of God. And it’s only with the awareness of loss that we’re able to rise above our own petty anxieties and take risks, express our true feelings, and live our lives the way they should be lived.

“The symphony must be like the world,” Mahler once told the composer Sibelius. “It must embrace everything!” And so must we—the spiritual, the hilarious, the embarrassing—if we’re to lead our best, richest lives.

For my dad’s unveiling in 2005, we brought a boom-box to the cemetery and blasted the Second Symphony. On the grave, we placed rocks that my cousin Daniella had taken from the garden next to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. My husband wore my dad’s old Siegfried and Roy T-shirt. The CD’s chorus sang, “That for which you suffered, to God will it lead you.” My dad (who’d left instructions when he was in the Navy in the 1970s that if he were killed in action he wanted a full military funeral—but including Mahler) would have adored it all.

I miss him every day. When he died, my daughter Josie was not quite 3; I was eight months pregnant with her sister, Maxie. I do see him every day, in a way, in Josie’s musicality and Maxie’s goofy humor. Which isn’t enough, of course. But to be human is to experience loss; Yom Kippur’s Yizkor service makes that abundantly clear. It’s some small consolation, though, that the High Holidays are an opportunity for us all to ponder how to turn our suffering into music. Shanah Tova.

But even amid this bacchanal of otherworldly hotties, one breed of monsters fades into air: Forgive us, zombies, for we know not what we do.

To be sure, the undead aren’t altogether invisible in popular culture. AMC’s Walking Dead is a fine and thrilling depiction of the days following the zombie apocalypse, and a few recent movies, from Zombieland to Shaun of the Dead, have had clever fun with brain-eating ghouls. But while American girls have neatly lined up in Team Edward and Team Jacob and spent many slumber parties arguing the respective merits of the pale bat versus the big dog, none, I assume, has pined to find herself in the slightly decomposing arms of a lovelorn zombie.

The reason for that is simple: Zombies are on the wrong side of the deathly divide. Unlike vampires, who, if TV and movies are to be believed, have a penchant for attending proms and making out with women in bars well into their 11th decade, zombies die first and then live on. And no matter how hard they try to impress, they can never, it seems, shake the grave’s dirt off their pants: We look at them and see nothing but reanimated corpses. Zombies can’t get no respect.

This should not come as a surprise. After all, in a society as fearful of death as ours, any intimate acquaintance with the afterlife is enough to doom one to the undesirable status of shotgun fodder.

Georges Bataille understood this instinctively. Writing about slaughterhouses, the French philosopher observed that having once been closely connected with religious, ritualistic sacrifice, and therefore placed prominently in the centers of towns, abattoirs have become, in modern times, cursed destinations to be avoided at all costs. “In our time,” he wrote, “the slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden ship. Now, the victims of this curse are neither butchers nor beasts, but those same good folk who countenance, by now, only their own unseemliness, an unseemliness commensurate with an unhealthy need of cleanliness, with irascible meanness, and boredom. The curse (terrifying only to those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouse, to exile themselves, out of propriety, to a flabby world in which nothing fearful remains.”

It would not, perhaps, be too much of a stretch to suggest that one of modernity’s key quests has been the eradication, by whatever means necessary, of death in both its physical and metaphysical forms. Science, law, literature: all bound together to diminish death’s terrible force, to rob it of the power to terrify and afflict. We spend a lifetime fighting death, and when it finally occurs in our vicinity, we rely on a handful of institutions—from hospitals to Hallmark cards—dedicated to helping us sublimate the jarring experience. Bataille was right: We’ll go out of our way to avoid death, even if rationally we know that it is merely life’s logical and inevitable conclusion.

The ancient Israelites, apparently, were no different. In this week’s parasha, we are presented with the strange law of the red heifer. This animal—“a perfectly red unblemished cow, upon which no yoke was laid”—is, God tells Moses, to be slaughtered and burned and its ashes used to purify those who have come into contact with the dead. And while the existence of such a process of purification may be comforting, Jewish thinkers parsing the parasha quickly stumbled on a small problem: Nature, alas, produces very few unblemished red cows. To many commentators, then, this particular law is an example of the Lord’s mysterious ways. Why propose a ritual that could, in all likelihood, never be fulfilled here on earth by us mere mortals? God only knows.

But zombie fans, a group with which I feel a semi-religious affinity, know better. We know that the fear of death, then as now, is a strong and savage force; nothing can spook the living more than coming into contact with the deceased. But what might we do, given that death is all around us? Find a red heifer. And if those are extremely rare? Keep looking.

This is God’s coup de grace. In commanding a ritual involving a species of animal of which he had created so precious few, the Almighty both comforts us by suggesting a magical process by which we might cleanse ourselves of death and forces us to confront our fears once we realize that said magical process is, like all bits of magic, little more than an illusion. This one-two existential punch is the only way to get us to stop worrying and learn to love the great beyond.

Even now, more than 3,000 years after Moses, it’s a lesson we’ve yet to fully learn. We flock to vampire fiction en masse, infatuated with the fanged bloodsuckers and their alabaster skin and eternal youth, or fawn over werewolves and their virility. But we never live forever, and we’ve no red cows to redeem us; much like zombies, all we’ve left to do is slowly become accustomed to the inherently frightening notion of life after death.

By the time of these memories, in the early 1960s, when I was 6 or 7, the rural had given way to the suburban, with ranch houses and expanded Capes surrounding Lake Nelson. But in a cold enough season, when the shallow water froze and two-by-fours burned in trash barrels for warmth, my father retrieved his skates from the closet and headed for the ice.

The skates rose above his ankles, the laces ascending through 10 sets of eyelets and six pairs of metal studs. They were figure skates, toughened by black polish and the scalpel sharpness of the blade. I had a beginner’s skates with blades as dull as a pencil’s shaft.

My father, in his patient way, had taken it upon himself to teach me to skate. I was a good enough athlete when it came to touch football and swimming lessons at the JCC, but neither balance nor precision came naturally to me. So, my skates slapped at the surface of Lake Nelson and my legs splayed outward and my knees knocked and sweat popped on my forehead, even in the 20-degree air. Just beyond my wavering reach, my father skated effortlessly backward, calling out strokes to me like a coxswain, urging me forward to meet his grasp.

When I gave up in frustration, as I inevitably did, he took my halt as his cue. With a glance every so often over his right shoulder, he threaded his way backward across the lake, not a wasted motion in his strides, sometimes lifting one skate off the ice, perfectly balanced on a sliver of steel. I watched him in awe.

*    *   *

On a spring morning last year, we sat, my brother and sister and I, outside the hospice room where my father lay dying. Our vigil was into its second week by this time, and what preceded the vigil were 20 years of prostate cancer, two or three of advancing diabetes, and several months of kidney failure.

At one point in those last days, my brother sat beside my father, and my father spoke. “Give it to me straight,” he said, a ramrod voice emerging from beneath the morphine, a more assertive statement than he had issued in weeks. My brother, making certain this order wasn’t part of some delusion, asked my father what he’d said.

“Give it to me straight,” my father repeated.

“Everything?” my brother asked.

“Everything.”

My father heard a tenderly expressed version of everything, and the next day he drew his last breath. The three of us were gathered around him, watching him gasp for air, watching the very last beat of pulse pass through his carotid artery. Looking at his open mouth, looking at the tight, dry skin of his face, looking at the remnant of feathery hair on his scalp, I couldn’t help but think of a baby bird, waiting for its mother to feed it.

Because his death at age 89 had not come as a surprise, we children and my stepmother had spent the previous days talking about what kind of funeral to have. My father was a Jew by heritage and an atheist by fervent choice. His anarchist mother and father, the renegade offspring of a rabbi and a cantor, respectively, were the sort who feasted and danced at Yom Kippur banquets. My father rarely spoke the noun “religion” without affixing the adjectives “materialistic” and “sectarian.”

Yet he had approved a Jewish funeral for my mother decades earlier and done the same for his eldest brother in 2006. He had maintained a membership for 40 years at a Reform temple. Its rabbi had visited him in the hospice. There were people in our nuclear and extended families—myself, several cousins—who found meaning in observance.

So, my siblings and stepmother and I struck a compromise to oblige the dead and solace the living. We would hold a secular funeral for my father, presided over by the Ethical Culture Society leader who had married him and my stepmother, while those relatives who yearned for a religious form of leave-taking would be free to do so in a private way.

*   *   *

One Sunday during the years when I played Little League baseball, my father took our family to the ballet. As we sat in the balcony at Lincoln Center, gazing down onto the stage, my father whispered to me of the male dancers, “They’re in better shape than Mickey Mantle.”

Devoted to baseball and its heroes, I could not comprehend then what I know now was perfectly true. My anarchist father was a student of the body, including his own. He lived in his skin as much as he lived in his mind.

When he skied, he cut parallel turns with the precision of the machinist he had been. When he played catch with me, his fastballs stung my palm through the mitt. Even at bowling, by appearances so sedentary a game, he exuded muscle. He would loft his 16-pound ball so that it seemed to hang in midair like a planet. Then it would fall to the polished alley, flirting with the gutter, until its wicked rotation sent it crashing into the 1-pin, scattering the other nine sideways with destruction. I, the failed acolyte, struggled for spares.

When I reached my teens and saw my father adding some pounds to his middle, I once tossed out the boast that I could beat him in a race. He dared me to prove it. So, we drove over to the track of a nearby college and lined up for a 440, one full lap. I went out fast and heedless and by the second turn, as I was straining for air, he cruised by me in a controlled, steady pace. He was waiting for me at the finish line, and I said nothing all the way home.

Long after such Oedipal battles stopped mattering, I loved walking with my father, whenever my adult life and working schedule put me in his vicinity. He went out for three or four miles every morning, legs snapping briskly, as much the image of physical efficiency as on the Lake Nelson ice. Now we moved in tandem, and perhaps, though he never said it, he was proud that into his 60s and 70s he could keep pace with a son 34 years his junior.

*    *    *

In the hours after my father’s death, we in the immediate family made the funeral plans. The ceremony would take place four days later, no concession to the Judaic tradition of burial within 24 hours, with a luncheon at a nearby hotel to follow. Meanwhile, the observant portion of the extended family made our plan to stay at the gravesite after the others left to say kaddish. But I already knew that prayer alone felt somehow insufficient. By then, my father would have been reduced to ashes, having requested like my mother to be cremated. I could feel nothing for ashes.

So, the idea took shape with my fiancée and a cousin to wash my father’s body, to fulfill the ritual of tahara. We arranged to do it on the morning after he died, in the funeral home where his body then lay. It was not a Jewish funeral home, and in fact the funeral director in his private life was a church deacon. Maybe because of his own faith, though, he understood and respected the imperatives of ours.

On a damp and raw morning, well-suited to our somber task, we arrived. My cousin had brought an ArtScroll volume of funeral and burial liturgy, as well as a set of tahara prayers he had printed off the Internet. I knew much less than he did. But I was answering to some imperative I did not yet fully understand, something even more specific than being Jewish and being a son.

The funeral director led us from his office through several empty salons to a room in the rear where my father’s corpse waited on a stainless-steel table. My cousin and I put on white robes, almost like lab coats, and rubber gloves. The funeral director opened the cold-water tap of an industrial sink. My fiancée read from the prayers and began to weep.

*    *    *

Nearly a decade before he died, my father began to severely limp. He had already undergone one hip replacement, quite successfully at that, but now the other was afflicting him. Or so his doctors informed him. My father came up with his own diagnosis, irrespective of the evidence: He decided he had bone cancer in his spine.

Instead of having the hip-replacement surgery, he walked less and sat more. His legs, those legs that had skated and walked and beaten me in a race, began to atrophy. When I asked about getting the hip replacement, he shrugged me off with vague assurances. He told my stepmother he was fearful of dying on the table from the anesthesia, something that had happened to one of his childhood friends.

Ultimately, years too late, he consented to the operation. It turned out he didn’t even need full anesthesia, just the half-measure called twilight. He did his designated week or two in rehab and then skipped almost all of the outpatient follow-up sessions. Back at work, as founder and board chairman of a biotechnology company, he moved around its office hallways and factory floor in a golf cart. When he flew on vacations, he required a wheelchair to get from the ticket counter to the gate.

My father’s mind remained undimmed, a fact that I savored, especially after having seen his older brother disappear in a fog bank of Alzheimer’s. But I could not fathom how such a physical person could surrender his physical self. Never before had I seen him give up—at anything. Why this? I realized, at a certain point, that I did not just need him to be physical for himself; I needed him to be physical for me.

*    *    *

As I washed my father’s body, I looked upon it. I saw his foreskin, uncircumcised in his anarchist parents’ wish. I saw how hairless his skin was, the result not just of age but the female hormones prescribed to stave off prostate cancer’s advance. I saw the scar on his abdomen from the burst appendix that nearly killed him in his early 20s. I saw the seared flesh on one calf where he’d leaned against a motorbike engine on a trip we’d taken together to Bermuda decades ago.

His body was nothing like the body described in the verses my cousin chanted from the Song of Songs: “His head is burnished gold, the mane of his hair black as a raven … His arms a golden scepter … his loins the ivory thrones … his thighs like marble pillars. Tall as Mount Lebanon, a man like a cedar.” And yet to see his body, to touch his body, to watch his body, brought the person back to me.

I remembered that trip to Bermuda well. I was 16, my father 50. We had been fighting a lot, and my mother had suggested a short vacation together, father and son, as balm for our wounds. One morning, my father proposed that we walk the main road along the southern shoreline, 10 miles from our hotel to another one, where we would have lunch. Fit as I was, I worried we would never make it. My father, glad to be with me, needing nothing to prove, flagged down a cab after six or seven miles. We drank beers together at lunch, the sharp effervescence mixing with the dried sweat on my lips.

In the funeral home, when my cousin and fiancée and I were done, we dressed my father in the burial shroud and covered his head in a cloth hat and hoisted him into the cardboard coffin that would be transported to the crematorium, an odd choice indeed for a Jew of his era.

I am of a generation that has accepted as an unquestionable truth the premise that a corpse cannot look lifelike and that anyone who tells you so is either a mourner lying or a mortician selling. But on that dismal morning last spring, as I washed my father’s body in tahara, I was thankful beyond words to see that he did look like himself.

The purpose of tahara, we are taught, is spiritual. We purify the body to purify the spirit, make the literal into the metaphor. Yet for me the process ran in the opposite direction. Through the spiritual I sought to reclaim the physical—the tactile, inch-by-inch evidence of my vigorous, vibrant, virile father.

*   *    *

When I went to college in Wisconsin in 1973, I asked my father if I could have his skates. Winters were long in Madison, and there were lakes and canals and rinks for skating. So, he let me take them.

For my first two years of school, I continued to flail away, untrained. Finally, as a junior, I signed up for a no-credit class in skating. That winter and spring, I leaned how to stride and to push. I learned how to execute crossovers. I learned how to skate backward.

Living in New York for the past dozen years, I haven’t skated much, except to accompany my children as they took lessons. By now, the black polish has worn off my father’s skates. The blades are brown with rust. The inner soles have cracked. Meanwhile, my year of saying kaddish is ending. My father’s first yahrzeit falls on the 10th day of Iyar, May 14 by the civil calendar. The next day, our family will unveil the headstone for his grave.

To be honest, those skates never fit me right. My father wore a size-9 shoe, and I’m a 10½. Whenever I put on the skates, my feet start to cramp. One thing I’ve come to realize, though, is that a 10½ skate feels too big on me. And a hockey skate, as most men wear, feels too slippery. It’s only in my father’s skates, on the Lake Nelson of my bereaved soul, that I can imagine being able to catch up to his outstretched hand.

My life, after my mother died, was one long chain of doubts. Every day I thought of more things I should have done or said to her to demonstrate my love. It’s not as if I didn’t have the opportunity. Her death came almost exactly a year after her breast-cancer diagnosis, and I spent her last six months caring for her. I brought the garbage can when she was throwing up, helped her bathe and use the toilet. I told her I loved her a lot. I held her hand when she died, and I spoke at her funeral. Still, it’s impossible to look back and not have regrets. I think of the times I became irritated after a long day of doctor’s appointments; I wonder if I should have lobbied for hospice care earlier, to save her from having to endure more painful treatments, or if I should have pushed her doctors harder to try different drugs or protocols to buy us more time. And there is no end to the number of times I have wanted to reach back in time and slap my smug 16-year-old self for the hundreds of ways, great and small, that I was cruel and ungrateful. I was a teenager and it was expected, but still—it’s horrifying to look back on.

So, on Mother’s Day I’m filled with regret, but I’m also inevitably filled with rage. I know they’re straw men, but I can’t help feeling angry at the marketers and advertisers who assume we all have lively, lovely mothers who like flowers and French toast. Some of us never knew our mothers, or had mothers who walked out on us, or disowned us, or abused drugs, or abused us. Mother’s Day seems like a thumb in the eye of everyone whose mother is not typical or not alive.

This year, Mother’s Day happens to fall on the same day as the eve of Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, when the nation pauses to mark the loss of Israel’s soldiers and victims of terror. With the time difference, it means that as mothers in New York are sitting down to pancakes and receiving tulips, families in Israel will be lighting yahrzeit candles. On Yom Hazikaron radio stations play songs about losing comrades in battle and friends in explosions, and TV programs eulogize the dead. In the evening and again in the morning, a siren wails for a full minute across the country. Cars stop on the streets and highways, and their drivers get out. Conversations halt. People stand at attention silently; some weeping.

By the time most Israelis are teenagers, they are already experienced in dealing with trauma and loss. The mandatory draft means that nearly everyone has a friend or relative in the armed forces at any given time. The intensity and elegance with which Israel performs grief still moves me.

Mother’s Day couldn’t seem farther from Yom Hazikaron, but it turns out that it didn’t start that way. The 19th-century poet and feminist Julia Ward Howe, best known for penning the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” began crusading for a Mother’s Day for Peace in the wake of the horrific devastation of the Civil and Franco-Prussian Wars. Around the same time, Anna Reeves Jarvis was advocating for a Mother’s Work Day with a similar purpose. When Jarvis died, her daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, took up the mantle. But the second Jarvis was more concerned with honoring mothers and less concerned with promoting peace. (There’s a rumor that Anna was motivated in part by guilt; she and her mother apparently had an epic fight and didn’t have the chance to reconcile before the elder Jarvis died.) She successfully lobbied Congress for her cause (no one wants to be on the record against mothers), and in 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed a joint resolution that made the second Sunday in May officially a day to recognize mothers. Anna Jarvis soon became disillusioned with the commercialization of the holiday she had helped create, noting that “I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit.”

How strange to think that Mother’s Day, this day of greeting cards, wanted to be the thing that help end wars and the need for Memorial Days.

It’s a cruel coincidence that Mother’s Day and Yom Hazikaron overlap this year. They are very different holidays, of course, but I am struck by how sharp the contrast is as they both grapple with our desire to show love. In Israel, Yom Hazikaron functions as a placeholder for a country that lives constantly with grief. It’s a day when a parent whose child was on the wrong bus 10 years ago can shed tears over the loss in public, unconcerned that someone will tell her to move on or get over it. In America our love for our mothers is primarily demonstrated with gifts that acknowledge that our mothers are in dire need for pampering (massages, perfume, flowers, and the like). Mother’s Day tends to be about stuff; Yom Hazikaron is about recognizing pain.

Slate recently ran a survey on loss and noted in the summary of results that “one of the hardest aspects of mourning is feeling that one’s own grief is somehow not valid, not ‘normal,’ or has gone unrecognized.” On Mother’s Day, when the entire country seems to be reveling in maternal joy, it can feel like those of us with dead mothers are simply invisible. Yom Hazikaron wouldn’t be a holiday for me even if I did live in Israel—my mother wasn’t a soldier, or a terror victim—but it’s comforting all the same to know that Israel has a national way to recognize grief, to validate the pain of an entire country.

Mother’s Day assumes the best, even when so many of us have experienced the worst. Yom Hazikaron assumes the best, too, but acknowledges the exquisite ache of grief, the endless waves with which it hits you.

This year on Mother’s Day I’m leaving town. I won’t be at a restaurant watching other families have brunch, but I won’t be at a ceremony to mark Yom Hazikaron either. I’m heading to the forest, to hike and sit and hope I hear something like a siren.

Tamar Fox is an associate editor at MyJewishLearning.com.

Jonathon Rosen

Bad news, folks. I’m afraid John Calvin may have been right: Things suck, and they’re not going to get better, because you suck, too.

I’m paraphrasing.

Slightly.

Of all the religious nutters to have been right about the nature of God and existence, Judgin’ Johnny C. is the worst one. Mohammed I can deal with (what happened between Isaac and Ishmael is their own shit, Mo; leave me out of it). Buddha would be great, of course, a hell of a lot better than the God of either Testament, Old or New. But if Calvin and Sobs was right, we’re all fucked.

My conversion began back in January, when my son downloaded Pocket God, a popular iPod app. “Infrequent/Mild Violence” warned the iTunes store, which was significantly better, I figured, than he was going to get with the non-pocket God. I sat beside my son on the couch, my dog Duke in turn beside me, and watched the boy play. Here’s the game: You play God, and you either torture or feed a group of endlessly hopeful Islanders. You are neither rewarded nor punished for your rewards or punishments, and there’s an endless supply of Islanders. I’m not sure, to this day, what the point of the game is. Good God, bad God, let’s call the whole thing off. It was snowing outside, though, again, as it seemed to have been doing every day since August, and watching the little tan-skinned Islanders on the iPod screen gave me an idea.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said to my wife.

Duke looked up at me, thinking we were going for a hike.

“H word,” said my son without looking up from his screen.

“Where to?” asked my wife.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Somewhere warm.”

And so began the long wait for the beginning of March and our trip to a small island in the Caribbean. We watched as the snow piled up outside, as one storm passed and another arrived; icicles formed along the roofline so quickly that I couldn’t keep up; one grew so large that when at last it fell to the ground, it took out a section of our fence with it.

“Crap,” I said, looking out the window.

“C word,” said my son without looking up from his screen. I could hear the poor Islanders screaming in agony.

“Why are you being so mean to them?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s more fun,” he said.

The week before we left another series of storms blew across the Northeast, cancelling flights and shutting down highways. But when the day came for our trip, the skies were finally clear, the roads finally passable.

We arrived a few hours later in paradise, in Eden. The beaches were pristine and empty, the people friendly and helpful.

“Hello!” said the beaming taxi driver.

“Welcome!” said the sparkling hotel receptionist.

“Aye, Mon!” called Roger, the delighted beachside pot-dealer.

We had a wonderful few days. The trip was half over. This is where Calvin comes in.

I like Calvin because he didn’t mess around. Calvin was cold. He’s pure, unvarnished, unapologetic, religious extremism. He’s theological Jägermeister—not a little depravity, but total depravity. Unconditional election. Irresistible grace. Hardcore. His theology, basically, comes down to this: You suck. Totally. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t pray to make things better, you can’t repent to make things better, you can’t do shit. It’s predetermined, and this is the predetermination: Frequent/non-mild violence, pervasive misery. utter disappointment. Rated 18+, if you live that long. If life seems to get momentarily better, it will soon get monumentally worse, because all your sins are belong to us. Homeostasis is a bitch, Mankind, but get used to it; the game started before you got here, and we’re not changing the rules now.

I admire that kind of honesty.

I bought a shitty little car a while back. “It is what it is,” the salesman said.

“A shitty little car,” I said.

He shrugged. “I ain’t gonna bullshit you,” he said. Paraphrasing Calvin. Slightly.

I was standing in the hotel bar when the first voicemail message came through.

“Duke,” said Suzanna, “is vomiting.”

Duke is 12-year old, pretty old for a Rhodesian Ridgeback. We buried his older sister a few months ago, and Duke hadn’t been all that interested in life lately. The best part of the movie was over, it seemed, and Duke didn’t want to stick around for the damned credits.

Suzanna is a tech for our vet, and she has been our dog-sitter ever since Duke was a pup. I phoned her back and left a message.

On the television above the hotel bar, I saw the word “Flood.” More storms were pounding the Northeast—snow, rain, the usual, just a lot more of it.

The following morning, Suzanna left another message. Duke’s eyes were yellow, as were his gums; she was worried about his liver, and wanted to know if she could bring him in for a few tests.

Sure, I said.

Later that morning, my neighbor emailed to tell me that our road had been washed away in the floods.

Away? I asked.

Away away, he replied.

Why are you being so mean to them?

It’s more fun.

The last day of our vacation, it rained. I spent the afternoon in the hotel bar, trying to write. Roger, the delighted beachside pot-dealer, joined me at my table with some of his local buddies; he had become something of a friend over the past week or so. I told him about Duke, and about the road that had washed away, and about our trip being over, and how I was dreading the flight home: TSA always stops me, I explained, because they think my name is Islamic, when I’m actually Jewish.

“That’s why they stop you,” he said.

“Because I’m Jewish?”

“Who do you think,” my jovial islander friend asked me, “was behind 9/11?”

“Me?” I asked.

They all nodded.

We arrived home at midnight. It was raining.

“Goddamn it,” I said.

“D-word,” said my son.

We parked at the bottom of the road, and I carried the bags, one by one, up the washed-away road to the empty house; Duke was at the animal hospital, being kept alive on an IV drip; his liver and pancreas, said the vet, “needed a rest.”

We buried Duke two days later. The excavator trying to repair our road was kind enough to dig a grave for him, in the frozen winter woods behind our house, beside the grave of his older sister.

“Build a man a fire,” said Calvin, “and he will be warm for a day; set him on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.”

Fuck you, John, I thought.

The following day, my son asked me if he could download a new game called Plants Versus Zombies.

“What happened to playing God?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “It got boring,” he said.

Well, I thought, there’s always that. Even if Calvin was right, and it sure seems like he might have been, there’s always the chance, slight as it is, that God will just get bored and leave us alone.

And the Islanders rejoiced, and they sang, and they danced, and there was much happiness in the land, for God had logged off, and didn’t even want the free update.

Yes. There is always that.

If you weren’t a Medium watcher, let me fill you in. The show’s heroine, Allison (Patricia Arquette) was a psychic in Arizona who worked for the Phoenix District Attorney’s office, helping to solve crimes. She had to juggle her psychic visions, her relationship with her engineer husband, Joe, and the needs of her three quirky daughters.

It’s ironic that a show about the paranormal was so, well, normal. Allison didn’t look like the cookie-cutter starlets populating the TV universe. She wasn’t a size 2. She never wore spike heels to a crime scene. Her house looked like a real home, with unfortunate blue-and-yellow kitchen tiles I’m certain she hoped to replace as soon as they could afford it. Her girls squabbled at the breakfast table, and not in an adorable smart-assed sitcom-sassy way. I loved the show’s depiction of a loving marriage in which the partners fought and made up and had the same arguments over and over. (“Allison! Maybe that was just a regular dream, not a message from beyond the grave!” Oh, Joe.) Sure, the plot holes were so big you could drive an SUV that belonged to a dead woman now sending Allison messages about her murderer through them. But even though I didn’t always love the show, I always loved the show. It was like a beloved, sometimes maddening friend.

Parents don’t get a lot of televised validation of our lives. TV is escapism (and, indeed, Medium was great at deploying creepy music and creepy visuals to deliciously jumpy unreal effect), but TV can also make us feel pretty crappy about not measuring up to its fabulous artificiality. Not Medium. Medium was sisterly. It applauded us for making our marriages work. It knew how hard it can be to get dinner on the table when both parents work. It spotlighted the special-for-being-not-so-special moments real parents share—when we sit down on the porch or on the couch with a beer and a sigh after the kids have gone to bed, happy to slough off the day and reconnect with each other. Joe and Allison loved each other, entertained each other, and teased each other, but sometimes they went to bed without having sex, because they were tired.

They fought about childrearing. In one of my favorite early episodes, Joe was embarrassed that their oddball middle daughter refused to take off her new red bike helmet, sleeping in it for days and insisting on wearing it for her school picture. Allison reminded him that the school photo was a portrait of who the kid was at that moment, and that right now she was a little girl who loved her bike helmet beyond all reason. That’s familiar to a parent, and so were the fights about money, like when Joe wanted to tap into their daughters’ college savings accounts to fund a new business and Allison said no and Joe worried that Allison didn’t believe in him.

Medium was suffused with the dread of not being able to take care of your children—not being able to keep them safe, not being able to send them to an expensive camp, not being able to keep them from dating bad boys, and not being able to prevent them from being murdered in terrifying ways. Real-world fears and fantasy fears were smooshed all together in a great miasma of parental anxiety.

It’s hard to argue that a show about a family named Dubois was at all Jewish. But I’ll try. As the writer Rebecca Eisenberg posited on Facebook, the DuBois family, like Jews everywhere, share a tradition they inherited from the mother’s side of the family, one that is based largely on faith and is often questioned and misunderstood by others in the community. Remember in the first few seasons how Allison hid her talents? Towards the end of the series, her special qualities were well-known, and she exuded pride in them. That is a nice arc of assimilation to acceptance. And of course, the fact that a show about the afterlife never actually professed to know what happens after death felt very Jewish.

Of course, the main reason for Medium’s success is that the notion of being loved and cared for from beyond the grave is powerful. The day I gave birth to Maxine, shortly after my dad died (Maxie is named after him), my ultra-rational, non-woo-woo mom told me a story. As she entered the subway to come meet the baby for the first time, a Latin musician was playing “Moscow Nights” on the guitar. It was one of my dad’s staples when he was in a folk-acoustic combo in college, a song he played every time he picked up the accordion at home when I was little. “Moscow Nights” is not exactly a fixture in the subway music world. Then when Mom arrived at my apartment and started to clean (moms!), she picked up two plastic magnet letters that had fallen off the fridge. The letters were M.I.—Michael Ingall.

Of course neither mom nor I think my dad was throwing magnets on the floor to remind us of his presence. We felt his presence all the time ever since he died. Or maybe that was his absence. It can be hard to tell those things apart. And that, too was part of the appeal of Medium: the show’s constant reminders that there is no love without loss. How can I not think of the Yehuda Amichai poem, “Near the Wall of a House,” which reads: “Love is not the last room: there are others / after it, the whole length of the corridor / that has no end.”

I hope so. And Medium let me believe it—for an hour a week, anyway—literally as well as figuratively.

Cartoon from Yiddish satire magazine Der blofer (April 1, 1927):
Q: What’s the big rush? Who are the chasing? What happened?
A: They say there’s a man over there who hasn’t tried suicide yet.
CREDIT: Courtesy Eddy Portnoy

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But in contrast, we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, whose lives didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. That began to change in the late 19th century, when the Yiddish press hit the streets, for the first time recounting the lives of the unwashed masses of Jews in the public record. Tablet Magazine offers some of their stories, reconstructed from century-old newspaper accounts.

Although suicide is categorized as a type of murder in the Jewish tradition, its illicit nature has not stopped everyone from shuffling off their mortal coils on their own terms. Statistics indicate that though Jews are less apt than other groups to commit suicide, they are not removed from it altogether. And at certain times and in certain places, suicide has actually increased among Jews, especially when economic and social conditions have gone south. One 19th-century German statistic indicates that as rates of assimilation grew among Jews, so did rates of suicide. There’s nothing like a conflicted identity to make one feel like ending it all.

Because of suicide’s disreputable status in Jewish law and because, as is so often the case, it was frequently a mystery why a close friend or relative threw himself off the top of a building or drank a vial of poison, suicides were a source of embarrassment to survivors. The departed became the topic of family secrets. Once the Yiddish press came along, though, it was tough to keep anything in Jewish life very private.

In Warsaw, for example, there were huge numbers of suicides during the 1920s and 1930s, which reporters wrote about with gusto at least once, and often multiple times, each day. Readers seemed to love nothing more than a juicy story with an unhappy ending.

“The number of suicides has increased in a frightening manner on the Jewish street. Not a day goes by without at least a couple of Jewish suicides,” began an August 1931 article in Moment. The story tells of three suicides that occurred the previous day: 19-year-old Benjamin Levin killed himself by asphyxiation; 26-year-old Yitzhok (no last name given) poisoned himself with iodine; and 38-year-old Dvoyre Berger jumped out of a fourth-story window. The latter two deaths were understood to have been undertaken as a result of severe poverty, the reason for many Warsaw Jewish suicides, especially during the Depression.

Reporters who worked the suicide beat were usually anonymous, although journalists of note, including Dr. Gershon Levin and Shaul-Yitzhok Stupnitski, wrote articles every few years decrying the plague of suicides that had descended on the community and asking what could be done to stop them. Levin, for one, argued that the large number of Jewish suicides was the result of alienation from traditional life, the laws of which acted as a cork, plugging potentially explosive personalities.

No population in the Jewish community was immune to suicides; every group from the secular to the Hasidic experienced them. According to Haynt, in February, 1931, in the Polish shtetl of Lusiev, Shevakh Halperin jumped into a well wearing his tallis and tefillin; in August of the same year, Anshel Gotfried ended up as a floater after drinking poison in Lemberg’s biggest mikveh.

Many of the victims had tried killing themselves more than once. “For the third time, the nervous tallis dealer Avrom Aba Lehrer tried to commit suicide,” reported Warsaw’s Haynt in September 1927. “A few months ago, on a beautiful summer’s night by the light of a full moon, he attempted to hang himself by a beam under a wooden bridge on the Vistula near the Citadel. But the rope was too weak and it broke. Lehrer fell between the pillars of the bridge and lay there all night with the noose still around his neck.” Botched suicide attempts spun off into the creation of “suicide comedy” in the pages of the city’s Yiddish humor mags.

Pinye Rogochinsky, a Warsaw Socialist who lived with his three brothers, was known as the “Shabbos Suicide,” for his failed attempts to kill himself on the Sabbath. One day, reported Moment in March, 1927, after having caught a cold, he stayed home in the rented room the brothers shared on Stavski Street. At about 11 that morning, neighbors heard screams. They tried to open the apartment door to no avail; it was locked. They could hear Pinye thrashing about as his wails grew louder. When they finally broke the door down, the neighbors found him with a knife in his hand, lying in a pool of blood. Having nearly butchered himself, Pinye howled to his neighbors, “Down with the bourgeoisie!”

Among those who attempted to confront the suicide crisis was Reuben Gildenstern. Having grown up in early-20th-century Palestine, he traveled to Europe after receiving a large inheritance. While abroad, Gildenstern, who spent two years on the Russian estate of Leo Tolstoy as a literary groupie, fell in love. His affections were unrequited, and he ended up attempting suicide a total of eight times. In a 1926 interview in Moment, he said he had no regrets about “remaining among the living” and dedicated his life to helping those with similar temptations resist them. Gildenstern created a club in Vienna where survivors of attempted suicide could enjoy one another’s company. He also wanted to launch a Budapest-based magazine titled Der Selbstmörder or The Suicide. His plan was to hire only what he called “one-time suicide candidates” as his writers, editors, typesetters, and printers. These people were, he felt, the best candidates to understand what it meant to feel the need to kill oneself. He was adamant on this point, which is perhaps why the magazine never came to fruition.

But the ever-resourceful reporters of Warsaw’s Yiddish press could always be counted on to bring in a good suicide story. And, during the 1920s and 1930s, at least a handful appeared each day in the crime blotter. Suicide was a type of murder, after all, and as such required investigation. Whether it was the story of the woman who was sliced in half after capriciously diving under the wheels of a tramway car while on an afternoon stroll with her father-in-law, or the high-school student who hanged himself in detention, or the spurned lover who drank poison and leaped out of a fourth-story window into the courtyard of his ex-girlfriend’s building, these minor, daily tragedies kept the readers of Warsaw’s Yiddish press horribly entertained.

***

Here are some samples of Yiddish press accounts of suicides.

Moment, April 1927

“The Anatomical Institute Returns the Body of a Jewish Suicide Because the Bones Are Worthless”

As readers remember from December of last year, a young Jewish girl committed suicide by jumping from the fourth floor (on Targova St.) because she was not able to recover from tuberculosis.

That victim, Rokhl Weinstein, left a will saying that her body should be donated to the Anatomical Institute so “it can be helpful in finding a cure for this dreadful disease” of which she was a victim. That exact expression was taken directly from her will, which she had scrawled in ink on her body. Not wanting to deny her wish, the dead girl’s family did not try to oppose her decision and the body was sent to the Anatomical Institute, where it has been for the last four months.

On Saturday, the Burial Society received a notice from the Anatomical Institute, saying that the body of Rokhl Weinstein is of no value for scientific inquiry, because the most important bones were damaged by the tuberculosis. Therefore, they do not need the body and request that they take it.

Yesterday, the Burial Society picked up the body and the burial takes place today.

And so ends the tragic life story of 17 year-old Rokhl Weinstein. Even her bones are worthless. Even the humanitarian efforts she attempted in her could not be fulfilled.

Moment, May 1927

“Jewish Boy Commits Suicide in the Courtyard of his Ex-Fiancee on 19 Mila St.”

Around 9 am, a number of residents of 19 Mila Street watched as a young man leapt out of a third story window.

The victim landed on the thick electrical wires that spanned the courtyard on the second floor level and he remained there, dangling.

Many people came running to see what happened after hearing screams. In the midst of the chaos, no one could figure out what to do.

In the meantime, after hanging on the wires for a number of minutes, the victim fell onto the brick street, receiving horrible bruises over his entire body.

Emergency services were called and the doctor who arrived determined that the victim drank a large dose of iodine before jumping.

The victim was brought to the Jewish hospital on Tshista Street in critical condition. It appears that the victim was 18 year-old Yekhiel Braf, who had only a mother in the town of Kotsk. He came alone to Warsaw a few years ago and lived with his cousin, Khaym-Dovid Braf on 20 Mila Street.

The young man had studied to become a tailor and earned a decent wage. Recently, he began going to dance halls with his friends, where he showed off his skill as an excellent dancer.

Not long ago, Yekhiel made the acquaintance of Ms. Brontshe P. (19 Mila St.), also known as Brontshe the Cossack. She was also an excellent dancer and Yekhiel quickly fell in love with her.

Because Brontshe liked going out with elegant gentlemen and partying, the boy spent his entire savings on dates and theater tickets.

During Passover, Yekhiel went to visit his mother in Kotsk. He went to tell her that he had found his basherte and that he was preparing to get married.

During this time, however, Brontshe met another young man who was better off financially than Yekhiel. When Yekhiel got back to Warsaw, Brontshe made it clear that she didn’t want anything to do with him.

Yekhiel took it real hard. He stopped working and would walk around for days at a time as if there were a black cloud over him.

Yesterday at about 6 am he went over to Bzovski’s Pharmacy on Mila Street and bought a bottle of iodine. He went home with the bottle of poison with the intention of taking it in bed. But after getting in bed, his plans suddenly changed: he decided to go kill himself in the same house where his unfaithful “bride” lived.

At about 8:30 am he left home for 19 Mila Street. He wandered around the front gate for a while because he thought Brontshe might pass by and he would get to see her one last time.

Finally, he went up the stairs, drank the bottle of iodine and jumped out of the window.

When Brontshe found out about it, she also wanted to poison herself. But residents saw what was happening and they stopped her. The condition of the victim is critical, but not hopeless.

CREDIT: Justin Gabbard

The number of extremist groups in the United States exploded in 2009 as militias and other groups steeped in wild, antigovernment conspiracy theories exploited populist anger across the country and infiltrated the mainstream, according to a report issued today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC documented a 244 percent increase in the number of active Patriot groups in 2009. Their numbers grew from 149 groups in 2008 to 512 groups in 2009, an astonishing addition of 363 new groups in a single year. Militias—the paramilitary arm of the Patriot movement—were a major part of the increase, growing from 42 militias in 2008 to 127 in 2009.

—SPLCenter.org

The population of the town in which I live is roughly 2,400 people. Of those people, I know approximately 50 or so by name, and of those 50, there are only 17 who I think will let me hide with my wife and children in their attic during the next genocide. This is assuming those 17 people haven’t already promised their attics to other Jews, blacks, homosexuals, Asians, Europeans, immigrants, etc., which I’m fairly sure at least six of them already have.

First come, first saved.

Heh.

The trouble is, I have a wife, two small children, and two large dogs; realistically, we’ll probably need a whole attic to ourselves. My oldest son is 5, he can sleep on the floor with us, but my youngest is only 9 months, so we’ll need the portable crib and possibly the walker (there are locks on the walker’s wheels, so we can keep him from moving around if the authorities arrive and question the family below). I’m not being greedy, just pragmatic, and, of course, if the attic is big enough, we would be more than willing to share it with another young couple, or maybe some children whose parents have been arrested by the authorities. (They’ll need constant reassuring, which I’ll be happy to give them in the early days, but as the genocide drags on, they’re going to get on my nerves, I know that now; man up, kids, this isn’t easy for anyone.) My infant, though, has a very sensitive stomach (he gets it from me), so whoever shares the attic with us, if that’s the only situation we can arrange, ought to know straight away that we’re not sharing his baby food, I don’t care how grim the situation becomes; he pretty much eats only strained carrots and the occasional jar of pears, so forget about it. I’ll bring an extra loaf of bread, they can have some of that. (The truth is, if we really do end up sharing the attic with two small children whose parents have been arrested by the authorities, I’ll probably change my mind and share with them even though I’m saying now that I won’t; I’ll bring extra jars of the strained carrots, just in case.) If you fail to plan, the saying goes, you plan to have your windows shattered and your family arrested, their heads shaved and thrown into gas chambers.

Heh.

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation. Hate groups stayed at record levels—almost 1,000—despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America.

I don’t actually believe there will be gas chambers this time around. Genocidaires (and we’re all genocidaires eventually) are nothing if not proud, and they hate to repeat the extermination methods of others. Concentration camps, yes, there’ll definitely be camps. Some things are just basic. I used to think that there would be another Jewish Holocaust, but now I’m just sure there’ll be another Holocaust, Jewish or otherwise; when I was younger, the only genocide I knew about was the Jewish one. It was the only one I was taught about, the only one that mattered. Since shouting “Never again” about the genocide 60 years ago, there have been at least a couple more, and it soon becomes depressingly clear: As bad as the world seems if you’re standing in the Jewish part of town, it’s really no picnic anywhere else.

It would be nice if the attic we hide in is somewhere close to our home, not just so that we can get something if we forget it (I’ll definitely forget my iPod, I always do), but so that when the genocide is over, we don’t have too far to travel. We won’t be in the mood for it, I can tell you that. (This is assuming we all live, which we probably won’t, and that our house hasn’t been burned down, which it probably will be; to be totally honest, given the choice between the house being burned down and some high-level genocidaire taking it over and using it as some upstate New York command center, I’d go with the burning down—I don’t like having people in my house even when I’m there, let alone when I’m not.) That’s why, of the 11 people I think would let me and my family hide in their attic that haven’t already promised their attic to someone else, my first choice would be my neighbors, the Andersons. Unfortunately, their dog died recently, and they now have a puppy (Lab-Bernese mix); even if the damn thing doesn’t spend all day barking at the attic (dead giveaway), she’ll drive my own dogs crazy, and they’ll want to go down and play with her. I’ll feel bad about keeping them locked up there with me (Did the Germans kill the dogs of Jews, too, or just the Jews? I assume that they did, but I don’t know for sure; maybe they just killed the dogs that seemed Jewish, like beagles), and it will only get worse when the puppy goes outside to play.

The anger seething across the American political landscape—over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as “socialist” or even “fascist”— goes beyond the radical right. The “tea parties” and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.

Jason, my other neighbor, would definitely let my family and me hide in his attic, except that he has no attic, and, like the Andersons, he also has dogs. He would no doubt ask his friend Amanda if she would hide us instead, but she is going through a separation at the moment and may not be in her house by the time the genocide starts. (Even if she is, and even if she had an attic we can stay in, I think it’d be best if we found somewhere else; I like her soon-to-be-ex-husband, but people going through break-ups can be erratic, and he might report us to the authorities just to get her in trouble.) That leaves our nanny Elsa, who is from Eritrea, and I can only assume would be a target of whatever round-ups the rounder-uppers were rounding up, or Erin, our other nanny; Erin’s mother is white and her father is African, so I assume they would be rounded up as well, Erin along with them. All that leaves is Mike and Rose, friends of ours a few miles away. I’m sure that Mike would let us stay in his attic, but Rose is a devout Christian and though she has never said so, I suspect she silently resents my writings about God. And so that will be the big ironic ending—after years of worrying that God will kill me for the things that I write, a genocide (at last—you were right, Mom) will start here in America and, with nowhere left to turn, I’ll pack up my wife, my children, and my dogs, and we’ll run under the cover of darkness to the only friends we have who might be able to hide us in their attic, and they’ll turn us away, because of what I wrote about God.

Heh.

Oh well: praemonitus praemunitus as the saying goes—forewarned is forearmed, which is not just a good idea, it’s also the title of the second American edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Heh.

No, really.

You know, the little questions.

These imponderables may stump rabbis and philosophers, but children have their own ideas.

A close friend of mine passed away last week. Her name was Lisa, and she had been battling cancer for some time. Her death was not unexpected, least of all by me; I expect death, even when it isn’t expected.

My son didn’t take it as well. He’s 5 years old, and he began having nightmares that very night. He was afraid I was going to die, or that my wife was going to die, or that he was going die.

I needed to ease his worry. I needed to calm his fears. I needed to reassure him that life doesn’t end abruptly, that death doesn’t usually come unexpectedly, that we were all going to live for a very long time.

“I may not be the best person for this job,” I told my wife.

The trouble, of course, is that I believe exactly the opposite to be true. Life, wrote Hobbes, is nasty, brutish, and short. He was optimistic. More often it’s nasty, brutish, and long. And nobody, quite literally, gets out alive. People like to describe birth as beautiful. I’ve been present at two births now, and I’m not sure I agree. Where others see a beautiful, innocent baby entering the world, I see a prisoner being forced into a prison cell, the steel door slamming shut behind him.

“Let me out of here,” he shouts, “I’m innocent!” The brutish guards laugh and walk away. Later, a doctor comes by and removes his foreskin.

Tough room.

This world, I mean.

If anything, I want to apologize to my son for having brought him into this world; now, somehow, I was supposed to reassure him he wasn’t going to be leaving it anytime soon.

“Maybe you could talk to him instead?” I asked my wife.

“I did,” she said. “He needs to hear it from you, as well.”

And so, one morning, after another night of nightmares, I made my son some breakfast, strapped him into his car seat, and drove him to school.

“Hey, buddy,” I said. “I want to talk to you about Lisa.”

* * *

We are born astride a grave, wrote Samuel Beckett, the light gleams an instant, then we have our heads shaved, are forced into cattle cars, crammed into gas chambers, buried in mass graves, and then it’s night once more.

I’m paraphrasing.

On the top shelf of my bedroom closet, all the way in the back, I have a bottle of Viagra. I don’t have erectile dysfunction; I have a mother who is a second-generation survivor.

It’s not quite as dramatic as that—her father, my grandfather, was shipped out of Poland by his parents before he could be shipped into any death camps. He did, though, lose most of his family, and I was told the stories. All of them. The Brothers Grimm were never so grim. The horror stories didn’t end at home. The official policy of my elementary-school yeshiva was that television is the tool of the Evil Inclination; but when NBC aired a nine-and-a-half-hour miniseries called Holocaust, viewing was mandatory.

“Can it happen here?” I asked my mother after Hour Nine.

By the way: fuck you, James Woods. I’ve wanted to say that for a long time.

“Of course,” she said. “To be a Jew is to be hated.”

Tough room.

This made me a very nervous child. When non-Jews befriended me, I silently wondered if they would hide me in their attics or report me to the authorities. Every ordinary frustration—every movie that opened on Friday night, every store that closed just as we arrived—I attributed to classic Jew hatred.

You know why Nabisco puts gelatin in their food?

They’re anti-Semites.

You know why Miami Vice is on Friday night?

Don Johnson hates Jews.

I even misheard lyrics, finding anti-Semitism where there was none. Bob Marley? Nazi:

“Old pirates, yes, those rabbis,
sold us to the merchant ships. ”

Sure, Bob, blame the Jews for slavery.

Ray Charles? Nazi:

“Everybody was Jewish, you could bet your soul,
They did the boogie-woogie with a study roll.”

Study roll? Is that a Torah? Asshole.

Blondie? Nazi:

“Flash is fast, flash is cool,
Francois sez fas, Flashe no Jews.”

I didn’t know what “Flashe” was, but whatever it was, it was fun, and Jews were clearly restricted.

Perhaps that’s why now, 30 years later, I’m writing this genocide book, a book that laughs at those who commit genocides as well at those who seem to revel in the memory of them. At those who victimize, as well as at those who would be lost without their victimization. Maybe telling children that they’re hated isn’t the best way to raise healthy children. The telling is clearly not for the child’s benefit. They grow up expecting death. They grow up anticipating hate. They grow up without Bob Marley. And they grow up not knowing what to tell their own children about being Jewish or about being hated. Or about death.

Which brings me back, finally, to the bottle of Viagra on the top shelf of my closet. I’m no idiot. I’ve seen the Holocaust movies. I’ve heard the stories. Prisoners buying food with cigarettes, trading Marlboros for bread, Camels for soup, Gauloises for freedom. So when I got the email a few months back—“50 Generic Viagra for $40, No Prescription Needed,” I thought, what the hell. Nobody smokes anymore. Next Holocaust, you want out? You want bread? Trust me—dick pills. There’s also a half-a-pack of Camel Lights back there. Like the lottery says, “Hey, you never know. But you know a genocide is coming.”

I’m paraphrasing.

* * *

“You see, buddy,” I said, “we all, you know, we kind of knew that Lisa was, you know, going to die.”

“Uh huh.”

“And that’s the way, you see, that, I mean, when people die.”

He was eating a blueberry muffin. He seemed OK. Maybe he didn’t care anymore. Maybe he was over it. What was my role here? What could I possibly tell him? How could I explain death and mortality and the cruelty of existence to a child? Cancer? You think cancer’s bad, kid? Cancer’s nothing compared to mankind.

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Well, you see, people don’t just die.”

“They don’t?”

“No. Not usually. Lisa was sick for a long time. We knew she was going to die. But I’m not sick. And Mommy’s not sick. And me and you and Mommy and your little brother are all going to live a very long time, and nobody is going to bother us and nothing bad is going to happen. OK?”

“OK.”

Ohhhhh. Lying. That’s my role.

That I can do.

“Does that help, buddy?”

“You know what, Dad?”

“What is it, buddy?”

“I think I like the chocolate muffins better.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

The previous week, I’d explained to Maxie and Josie, her 8-year-old sister, that there was an earthquake far away and that Daddy and I were sending tzedakah money to help the people. Did they want to do the same? They did. We’d emptied their tzedakah box and brought its contents to a fundraising drive for Partners in Health at school. But, you know, I’d never mentioned death. Now Maxie is ruminating a lot: Can we go to Haiti? What happens if our house falls down? Why don’t we have earthquakes in New York? Do we know anyone who died in an earthquake? Zayde is dead, but he didn’t die in an earthquake.

And suddenly I realized that while I’d had a sit-down conversation about death and grieving with Josie when she was just shy of 3, I’d never done so with Maxie. When Josie was in preschool, my dad died. Josie saw me crying, saw Bubbe crying. We explained that Zayde had died, which meant we couldn’t see him anymore. Like the flowers in our garden that wither and fade and get absorbed back into the earth, Zayde would be buried and we’d remember how he looked and what he did even after he was gone. Josie didn’t really get it. For weeks she said, “That’s Zayde!” whenever the phone rang. She went through a period of drawing Zayde’s corpse—with Xs for eyes!—and giving the pictures to my mom.

Maxie knows that Zayde was her grandfather, and that he died when Josie was little. She seems to grasp that “dead” means “ceased to be,” like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch. But does she actually understand?

Probably not. Experts say that until age 5 or so, kids can’t really comprehend the permanence of death. They still think they can outwit it. Maxie loves a book called Just a Minute by Yuyi Morales, about a grandmother tricking Senor Calavera—Death, in the form of a Day of the Dead skeleton—into not taking her quite yet. To me the story is sweetly, deliciously creepy and just a little sad, but to Max it’s all-out hilarious and satisfying. That makes sense, developmentally—kids her age tend to personify death: a skeleton, Voldemort, the Malach HaMavet. It’s not until age 9 or 10 that kids really grasp that death is concrete, permanent and inevitable for all living things.

So how do I address Maxie’s anxiety about death, disaster, and loss? Psychologist Sarah Chana Radcliffe, a parenting therapist in Toronto, says it’s not too late to reassure her. “Generally when small children ask about death, they’re really asking about separation—they don’t want to think that no one is going to look after them,” she says. “So you could say, ‘I probably won’t die for a very long time, but if something happened there would always be someone to take very good care of you.’” Radcliffe, who is religiously observant, continues, “If you use this language, you can add, ‘and eventually you will join me in Olam Haba.’”

I pressed Radcliffe to elaborate on how Orthodox Jews might explain death to kids. And as she spoke of a soul suddenly expanding, and of the joy of being reunited with Hashem, I felt jealous. I longed for that kind of confidence and serenity. Sure, I believe in God, but in the most nebulous God-is-some-kind-of-force-uh-I-don’t-know let’s-talk-about-social-action kind of way.

Delving too deeply into questions about suffering makes me twitchy. The notion of the Haitian earthquake having some heavenly purpose we can’t understand doesn’t work for me. The vastness of human suffering is too confounding to wave away with soothing words about God’s unknowable will. But neither am I comfortable throwing the Big Guy out with the bathwater.

But it is possible to talk about death and grief without bringing God into the conversation, says Rabbi Peter Schweitzer of The City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism. When I asked him how to address Maxie’s shpilkes, he handed the question to his 8-year-old son, who replied: “When people die they don’t go to an afterlife and nobody ever sees them again. Their skin and bones decompose into the soil.” Schweitzer told his son that this answer might not be comforting to a child, and his son replied, “But they’ll always be alive in your heart.” For humanistic Jews, that answer has to suffice, because that’s all there is. To Schweitzer, telling a child ”I don’t know what happens after we die” is often a cop-out. “As parents, we have a responsibility to lay out a picture of the world as we see it and help shape a worldview for our kids,” he argues. “Waffling is not a good thing if it really just avoidance of a tough topic.”

Ultimately, he said, it’s a parent’s responsibility to figure out what a child is really asking. Did Maxie want to know about what would happen to the children of Haiti, whether it would be possible to go see the devastation, whether we could go there to try to help out? “The first rule is find out what they already know about a subject,” Schweitzer suggests. “Be Jewish. Ask a question back. Remember the story of the child who asked a parent, ‘Where did I come from?’ and the parent thought this was an invitation for a lesson on sex, when the answer the kid really wanted was, ‘You came from Cleveland’?”

Funny. And good advice. But just as the full-on no-ambivalence omnipotent-and-good God version of Judaism isn’t my scene, the no-God version isn’t either. How to navigate these shoals is the subject for another column (or a dissertation, or an entire cosmology), but whatever your Jewish or theistic perspective, here are a few ground rules when talking about death with kids: don’t say things like “Grandma went to sleep and didn’t wake up,” unless you want your child never to put her head on a pillow again. Don’t say “Savta died because she was very old” because when a young person your child knows dies—as one inevitably will—it will rock that child’s world. (“Old and sick” is probably okay, if it’s true, as long as you clarify that most people who are sick do get better.) Don’t dismiss a child’s feelings of anger, be shocked by a child’s expressiveness—say, when she draws your father as a corpse every day for two weeks—or think a kid is being selfish if he makes death “all about him.” Anger is a legitimate emotion, kids process in their own ways, and the young are supposed to be self-absorbed. It’s in the rulebook. When your child feels helpless—as kids so often do, since they can’t even tie their own shoes—helping others is a good antidote. Encouraging kids to give tzedakah, make pictures for rescue teams or kids in hospitals, or donate toys to shelters can make them feel more in control. And when a relative or friend dies, sharing memories can keep them alive in our memories, as Rabbi Schweitzer’s son so wisely said.

Radcliffe offered a wonderful suggestion I intend to use with my kids in the future. She mentioned that we can tell older kids that research into near-death experiences shows that death is a peaceful, joyful experience. I can personally testify that this is true. In my 20s I had an anaphylactic allergic reaction and almost died. I passed out, stopped breathing, and was intubated by paramedics only in the nick of time. And I distinctly remember that as I lost consciousness, my feelings of terror evaporated. I felt warm, comfortable, elated. Suddenly I felt that I had enough air, though I didn’t. I saw a beautiful kaleidoscope and felt joy. Literature on such experiences is rife with stories like mine. I remember my dad, a doctor, explaining the medical reasons for most of what I felt. But hey, even if the common vision of a tunnel is caused by lack of oxygen in the brain causing compression of the optic nerve, isn’t it miraculous that the moment of death is happy and optimistic? Maybe this is evidence of God’s work and kindness, maybe it’s just a marvy trick of evolution, but it’s soothing either way.

Finally, consider that kids’ experiences of loss really aren’t that different from ours. A recent piece in The New Yorker about grief mentioned the work of 1970s psychiatrist and bereavement expert Colin Murray Parkes, who compared the physical sensations of mourning to what a child feels during separation anxiety. Death makes us feel alarmed because—like little children yearning for a parent who’s left the room—we’re unmoored from what we once relied on. And we keep searching for the missing person until we’ve finally created a new world without that person. It is what it is.

Freud said that “hysterics suffer from reminiscences,” although he didn’t have memoir-writing in mind. As I write my way back ceaselessly into the past, I wonder about all the things I only half-know and half-remember, random hysterical tics. Wasn’t I absorbing, all the time, the habits and styles of an invalid’s life? For a long time after my father’s death, I lost my interest in empirical science, so I don’t know if neurologists have figured out the mechanisms of Proust’s “involuntary memory.” I can see the headline anyway: “Researcher Locates Secret Ingredient in Proust’s Madeleine.” They’re tracking the section of our brain that lights up when we eat a favorite food of childhood, encounter a perfume our mothers wore. But what will the light tell us? We still can’t will memory into existence without changing it somehow. The conditions of the experiment affect its outcome, which is why, like most great discoveries, Proust’s recovery of his Combray childhood happens with a sudden loss of control, by accident. The true restored memory returns to us unbidden. Its sign is surprise. Or maybe the feeling of surprise is mistaken for the truth? Either way, in fits and starts, in idle hours or with strained purpose, over the last ten years I’ve tried repeatedly to write about the day I finally learned my father was dying from AIDS.

Such an event, oh yes, shouldn’t it be indelibly etched in my memory? Still, the scene keeps shifting: in one leadenly symbolic version, I’m interrupted while reading a letter from the girl I’d kissed a few weeks before. In another, I’m losing myself in a Yankees game, Mattingly batting in the third. I’d learned to play baseball mainly by watching him, the deep crouch at the plate, weight on the back knee, shifting quickly forward as the hips turned to bring the bat through to meet the pitch, the quick snap of the wrists used to fight off pitches and scoop errant throws to first. My father watches with me for two minutes, a look of pain and disgust on his face. He asks me to switch it off. I refuse until I notice that somehow, unlike his usual unprovoked attacks on my sports habit, this one is really serious. A third draft tries a tableau of a more unified family life—my father at his place at the kitchen table, opposite my mother, who I can see is trying not to cry. The biology textbook he used when teaching medical students, placed to his right, is open to the section on immunobiology. I’ve pulled around one of our high-backed cane dining chairs to see better, hunching uncomfortably over the edge of the table. As I press down into the wickerwork, a latticed tattoo is growing on the back of my thighs. It will look like the diagrams of molecules on the page. My father, sitting straighter, stretches a finger over the book, pointing out a section or chart of the various kinds of cells that make up our immune system. You could imagine it as a series of engravings, “My Father Explains the Mechanism of the Disease That’s Killing Him.”

In another version, he tells it as a bedtime story, as if I were a small child, but in his teaching voice, and with too many details:

Once upon a time, when you were about five or six years old. I was working on an idea I’d had for a new malaria drug. I was also supervising the sickle cell clinic at Mt. Sinai hospital, and most of the blood we used for experiments was taken as samples from our sickle patients. We were trying to mimic the benevolent, antimalarial effects of sickle trait without the crippling pain of the disease. One day, as I finished drawing blood from one of the regulars, I did something very stupid. I wasn’t wearing latex gloves, which you’re supposed to do whenever you’re handling blood, and as I was about to get the needle out of this guy’s arm, he jerked. The needle came out suddenly and poked me in the wrist, just below the vein. It was in for no more than a second or two. Now this guy had a lot of problems, not just sickle cell disease, but, like a lot of the patients, he’d got hooked on heroin to get rid of the pain. That’s when I came down with hepatitis; you were too little for me to tell you about it then. At the time we were beginning to hear about this new disease, one that a lot of heroin users contracted from contaminated needles.

It didn’t really happen in any of these ways, although each of them approaches some kind of composite representation of the event. Something happened, unmistakably, because before I went away for the summer I knew nothing, and when I started high school I knew my father had AIDS—had, according to him, anywhere from one to five years to live—and that I mustn’t tell anyone about it.

Given what I knew, his decision to keep his disease a secret from all but his two most trusted colleagues and his immediate family seemed strange. It was 1988, a time when the growing AIDS-awareness movement needed “innocent victims,” that false category, to show that the disease was more than “God’s punishment on drug addicts and homosexuals”—in the infamous phrase my father attributed to televangelist Pat Robertson. My father had not been quiet about humanitarian politics or his belief that biology was beyond good and evil. Only a few years earlier, he’d joined a group of doctors and musicians protesting the use of torture by U.S.-supported regimes worldwide in their “dirty wars” against the Left. He’d visited torture victims in Danish hospitals and signed petitions. But now, facing a near-certain slow death, he suddenly developed a terror of softer forms of persecution: being forced to abandon his laboratory research, being hounded by rumors that would destroy his peace of mind; he feared, too, for how I would be treated at school and what my mother would have to hear from supposedly well-meaning friends. While still alive, he would donate his body to science, participating in a host of clinical trials for the antiretroviral drugs that, eventually, with reduced side effects, would make AIDS a treatable, albeit chronic, disease among those who could afford them. He would not, however, become a spectacle or a spokesperson. Privacy mattered more to him than the cause of “enlightenment” he’d spent much of his intellectual and public life defending.

So great was the power of this secret that I still feel a twinge of betrayal whenever I mention my father’s illness in conversation. Also a great relief, followed quickly by something worse. For many years I’d only told a handful of people, mainly psychiatrists. It was my talisman, the sign of trust, as though by telling someone I gave them a special power over me, to wound or heal. I never knew how they would react. My nervousness would grow as the moment of truth approached, especially around women I’ve loved. Would I become, in that moment of revelation, a figure to be pitied rather than admired, an object for compassion instead of passion? Waifs, strays, and orphans are Dickensian tastes that mostly went out with my grandmother’s generation. My father was right in a way to want me to stay dumb. What chances did I have in my girls-just-want-to-have-fun generation if I didn’t keep things to myself? And what adolescent enjoys compacts of mutual pity? My first girlfriend sent me off to college health services for an AIDS test. Maybe she’d have asked anyone the same—testing your “partner” was practically part of the liberal arts curriculum in the early ’90s—but I took it personally. “I haven’t slept with my father,” I told her, “or anyone else.” “Do it for me,” she said, and I did.

What I actually remember most vividly about my initiation into my father’s secret life as a dying man was the sensation of air-conditioning. It was August, maybe around my father’s birthday, his 49th. My father loved air-conditioning, as he loved veal scaloppine, breaded or in a marsala sauce, red wines, old historical films on TV (anything with Errol Flynn or about World War II), a good stereo system, and a firm mattress. These were the few physical pleasures of his dying years.

It wasn’t only about coolness, his love of air conditioning; it was also the white noise. Only two things can really quiet New York City: snowfall in winter and the persistent hum of an air conditioner’s motor in summer. The drum circles and bandshell concerts in Central Park faded, the blaring horns, sirens, and car alarms were turned into muted background accompaniments. Later, I’d realize that he loved the machines for the same reasons he became a scientist and placed his faith in modern medicine. The air conditioner brought comfort and showed us our capacity for benevolent domination of the earth. He took pride in it, the same way he’d tell me stories of how malaria had been eradicated in America and most of Italy by draining the swamps and killing off the mosquitoes with insecticides. These were concrete signs of progress, of hope for the world, like the Zionist project to make the desert bloom—or, at least, to install air-conditioning in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

By the time I brought home the news that these helpful little machines released CFCs into the atmosphere and contributed to the depletion of the ozone layer—before we’d even heard of global warming—he was too committed to change. My triumphal announcement of a scientific discovery unknown to my father was not even met with skepticism, just indifference. By my last year of high school, we ended with a house divided: I sweated in my room with fans and open windows while my father would shut the door, shut out the noise, block out the sun, and read his way by lamplight through blazing afternoons. If I wanted to talk, he’d ask me if I wasn’t just visiting him to cool off.

All that was still to come. It’s entirely possible that my distrust of the sacred A.C. began the same night, just before the start of high school, when I heard about my father’s disease. After all, I’d just spent six weeks without it in the middle of Tennessee, where the heat and humidity exceeded even New York’s. They were happy weeks and seem happier now for being the last of my childhood, or the first of a more promising adolescence. I loved wildly, promiscuously: I fell for the twenty-year-old violinist from Buenos Aires who sat next to me at breakfast the first day. She immediately adopted me as a page—letting me tie back her long black hair before rehearsals, teaching me how to pronounce Spanish, Argentine-style: the double l (“¿como te llamas?”), the soft “sh” sound. Even now, when I hear it, most often in the mouths of soccer players or bearded intellectuals, some part of my brain, with deep pleasure, remembers her saying it. There was my neighbor in the boys’ dorm, a Korean flutist who introduced me to The Cure and also, one night in his room, to the girl whose letter I was reading sometime on or about the moment I learned my father was going to die. She probably didn’t fall for me so much as the stories I told her about the wonders of New York—the nightclubs I’d never been to and the museums and concerts I had. She was a girl of the Blue Mountains, the first punk I’d met, already dreaming of escaping her town. (“You must come visit,” I told her, as I walked her to her room after our last orchestra concert, and she reached out her hand, her dark purple-painted nails, to rest on mine.)

So I was already chafing, so to speak, on my return. I felt imprisoned; dreamed of the rosebush down the slope from the girls’ dorm. My sweet Rochelle (a whole other world in that name) and I kissed in its shadow. Now, clearly, I could never speak to her again. Her impression of me was utterly false. I’d become another person. What sort of person, I wasn’t yet sure about. I grew cold in my air-conditioned room and tried to make sense of death. All men are mortal, my father is a man, my father is mortal. He was going to die sometime in my life. It would be sooner than we thought. To keep the secret, the important thing was to behave as though nothing were wrong. This was what he said he wanted. Everything would go on as before. I would still do my homework as I had the previous winter while my father was hospitalized with “an allergic reaction to dust from the painters redoing our dining room.” That, at least, was my mother’s explanation as she packed me off to my aunt’s house for a few days. He actually had pneumocystis carinii, then one of the leading killers of AIDS patients. I’d known nothing about it. He could have died while I wrote an essay about To Kill a Mockingbird.

It was odd how little my parents asked of me. They were even sending me to France for the last two weeks of summer before high school. The refrain they used was that they wanted me to be “my own person,” independent, uninfluenced, unafraid, possibly unconcerned. I’d spend a great deal of my life picking at the paradoxes of such impossible imperatives as, “Be free,” “Enjoy yourself.” Did they just want me to go away? Or were they strange hypocrites, paying homage to 1970s virtues of “free to be you and me,” hoping all the while that who I was would prove to be what I ought to have been for them? Or maybe, through desperation or delusion, they really meant it, they really thought I could grow up strong, happy, and, yes, oddly unburdened and free—in spite of everything.

I went off to France with the family of the same friend my father once barred from our apartment. The trip has been erased from my memory except for one scene in which my friend and I were sitting on a rocky outcropping above the Avignon bridge, that great stone fragment that breaks off a third of the way across the Rhone. We were talking about high school, the year ahead. He had his yearbook committee, his soccer practice; his older sister’s friends gave him advice on how to pick up girls, how not to be a geek. I’d follow him a little while longer, my Hans Hansen, as though he had the secret of an easeful and successful life, but it was probably then that I knew we wouldn’t stay close. I watched the river beat against the ruined bridge, the bathers happily splashing their tawny bodies further down the bank, the absorbed fishermen as they looked over their lines. According to his parents, I was a terrible guest, moping and complaining as they drove us up and down Provence, visiting chateaux, vineyards, and Cézanne’s enormous white mountains. But I didn’t tell them a thing.

Ill. High Court OKs ‘Jews Only’ Inheritance [AP]

Misaskim on the Scene of Plane/Chopper Crash on the Hudson [Yeshiva World News]

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.

The call came when I was cooking dinner, which surprised me. Bad news usually comes in the middle of the night. My good friend Drorit’s daughter, Tal—one of my youngest son’s best friends—had been in a car accident. By early morning, she was dead.

The next day, an hour before Tal’s funeral, I rode my bicycle to the cemetery of our village on the Mediterranean shore in the Western Galilee. Everything was gloomy and gray: the sky, the sea, and the dismal task that lay before me. I’m a member of our village’s chevra kadisha, the burial society (the literal translation is “sacred society”). We perform the tahara, the washing and dressing of a dead woman for burial. About two hundred families live here, so I usually know the deceased. Most of the time the women are elderly, and while I feel somber doing their tahara, I sense that the women are at peace, surrendering to their fate. But now I faced performing this rite on a 17-year-old girl.

I began to wonder why I even agreed to this difficult volunteer job in the first place. I guess it began because of my own search for a meaningful Jewish life and because of a woman I’ll call Michal. A former ballet dancer, she had lived with James Taylor, hung out with the Beatles, and soared through the 1960s until she landed as a born-again Jew. I met her in the Long Island suburb where I lived for two years beginning in 1989. My parents, first-generation Americans, had raised me in that suburb—in fact, in that very same house. And while they had given me a sense of Jewish pride, they had passed on the idea that Jewish rituals and traditions were old-world superstitions. Now I found myself spiritually hungry. My father had passed away a few years before; I had three small children and a fourth on the way. I wanted to give my children a deeper sense of Judaism than the one I grew up with. I decided to check out a modern Orthodox synagogue nearby and I was struck by how warm and welcoming its members were. Then I met Michal, who began to serve as my spiritual mentor, proving that you could be hip and savvy and also a Sabbath observer. When she told me she was a member of the local chevra kadisha, I was intrigued. Michal explained that performing a tahara for a dead woman was the greatest mitzvah, the holiest deed one could ever do.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because the dead can never thank you.”

A tahara, then, was hesed shel emet, a one-way act of true kindness. The rite appealed to me, but living in the suburbs did not. I had wanted to live in Israel since visiting the country on a tour when I was 16, and so I moved here with my family in 1991, before I had the chance to join Michal’s chevra kadisha group.

Jewish tradition has stressed the importance of a proper burial since the Biblical account of Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpela to bury his wife Sarah. How Sarah and the other matriarchs and patriarchs were buried is a mystery. In Genesis, when Jacob summoned his son Joseph to his deathbed, he requested, “Deal with me in kindness and faithfulness. Please do not bury me in Egypt.” Joseph heeded the second part of his request and did not bury Jacob in Egypt; he did, however, embalm his father, an Egyptian practice that never caught on among later generations of Jews. Ironically, one of the first clear-cut references to what the ancient Jews did with their dead comes from the Gospel of John, who described how Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus’ body and “wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.” (The spices were a mixture of myrrh and aloe, but John doesn’t elaborate on their use.)

By the 16th century, the Shulchan Aruch, or Code of Jewish law, contained instructions on how to properly treat the dead. According to Rabbi Maurice Lamm, author of The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, membership in the chevra kadisha was always considered a privilege. Rabbi Elchonon Zohn, director of the National Association of Chevros Kadisha, says that in pre-World War II Europe membership in the chevra kadisha was passed on from father to son as well as from mother to daughter. So many people coveted membership that when new members were needed, they were chosen by lot or by secret vote. But in America, Zohn says, by the 1950s, non-Orthodox American Jews had begun to leave the care of their dead to funeral parlors, most without tahara options. “It became a very unpopular hesed,” Zohn says, “with only a few older people performing the service.”

In the 1970s, a Conservative congregation in Minneapolis created a stir when it started a chevra kadisha. (Rabbi Arnold M. Goodman, part of that group, describes the experience in his 1981 book A Plain Pine Box: A Return to Simple Jewish Funerals and Eternal Traditions.) There are no statistics on how many chevra kadisha groups now exist in the United States, but Rabbi Zohn says that in the past twenty years “there’s been a real movement toward being involved with chevra kadisha work, even among Reform and Conservative Jews, young people, and professionals.” The 10-year-old website Jewish-funerals.org, which features guidance for those starting a chevra kadisha as well as information about funeral traditions and organ donation, is visited by more than 120,000 people a year, according to its editor, David Zinner, executive director of Tifereth Israel Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C. Interest has sparked an annual North American Chevra Kadisha Conference that is now in its sixth year.

A few years after I moved to Israel, my friend Michal suddenly died. That same year the rabbi of our village asked me to join the chevra kadisha. By then, living in Israel had chipped away at my enchantment with religious fundamentalism. I still attended Sabbath morning services, kept kosher, and made traditional Friday night dinners, but I had begun driving on Saturday because, given a six-day work week, it was my family’s only day to visit friends in other places. Volunteering in the chevra kadisha was a way to honor Michal’s memory for all she had taught me. I also wanted to give something back to the residents of the seaside community I now called home.

I performed my first tahara on a woman I never knew. Throughout the ritual, I felt jittery and uneasy. I worried I’d do the wrong thing, move her body the wrong way. I took shallow breaths, partly out of fear and partly because I was wary of inhaling the stale, sour odor of the dead. As soon as the tahara ended, I stepped outside the burial house and breathed in deep. I was standing in the cemetery but I was still flooded with a sense of relief. I had returned to the realm of the living. The following morning, I went to the village synagogue and sat—randomly, I supposed—in another section, in a seat I had never sat in before. I looked down and saw the dead woman’s name: it had been her seat. It seemed like a divine act of synchronicity, a sign that being part of a chevra kadisha was something I should continue to do.

When a woman dies, the rabbi contacts one of the chevra kadisha members. She, in turn, calls the other women. As soon as I find out I have to do a tahara, I feel humbled. Whatever I was going through during the day—standing too long on line at the bank or celebrating a just-published short story—suddenly loses significance in the face of death. I change out of my usual pair of jeans and put on a patchwork skirt and a plain black shirt that I’ve set aside as my chevra kadisha clothes. I could wear any clothes to do a tahara, but I wore this skirt and shirt during my first tahara and after that, they seemed charged with a different purpose. My friend Ann, another American immigrant and chevra kadisha volunteer, says that she also has a set of chevra kadisha clothes. “That outfit is like a uniform,” she says. “It represents what I’m about to do. And it’s important that I can take it off afterwards and go on with my life.”

The village’s one-room burial house sits in a corner of the cemetery. It is a simple stone house, built in the 1950s. The cement walls are barren but for a small sink and faucet. The tiles on the floor have faded so much over the years that nobody can tell what color they once were. Several empty coffins stand upright in one corner, empty and ominously ready. When the chevra kadisha members arrive—a minimum of four women is required by Talmudic law—we greet each other quietly. Even if I’ve been in the midst of a spectacular day, I feel thoughtful, somber, focused. We don disposable latex gloves and white cotton lab coats—donated by a nearby hospital—that are kept in the burial house. And although only one or two of the chevra kadisha members are religious, we all wear scarves or hats as a sign of respect.

The dead woman lies on a marble slab in the middle of the room, covered with a sheet. Her feet face the door, as is the custom. First, we gather in a circle around the deceased and one of us says a prayer, asking God to help us perform our task with “loving kindness and with truth.” Then we get to work. With the sheet still over the dead woman to preserve her dignity, we carefully inspect the body, removing all bandages, hospital tags, and jewelry (I once gently plucked a gold Star of David necklace out of a dead woman’s closed hand).

As at a Seder, the order of the tahara is precise. We are required to use nine kavim of water (twenty-four quarts) and, beginning on the right side, we pour water on her head, her neck, arm, the upper half of her body, the lower half. We do the same on her left side, then her back. The tahara is really a woman’s last mikva, her final ritual bath. To borrow a Christian term—which was borrowed from the Jewish idea—this is her ultimate kosher baptism.

After patting her dry, we take off her nail polish, trim her fingernails, and brush her hair. We don’t add any makeup. Finally, we dress her in the tachrichim, the linen burial shrouds, which are grayish beige. There are no buttons, zippers, or pockets.

In other parts of the world, dirt is imported from Israel in recognition of the idea from Genesis that “dust you are and to dust you will return.” In our village, one of us simply scoops up some dirt from outside and sprinkles it on the deceased’s closed eyes. Then we cover her with the head shroud, followed by the pants, bunching them up at the bottom as if they were a pair of loose linen stockings. When I slide my hand into the sleeve of the shroud-shirt to pull the woman’s arm through, I’m reminded of dressing my newborn babies. But a dead woman’s skin is stiff and cold. I’ve never gotten over my discomfort at touching a dead woman’s skin, maybe because it represents all of death’s mystery. We loosely tie three sashes without knots to hold the shrouds in place and say a prayer, asking the dead for forgiveness if we unintentionally disrespected her in any way.

This is the ritual if a woman dies peacefully. But Tal, my son Ari’s friend, had been in an accident and her body was splattered with blood. Since blood is holy, a part of the body, it must not be washed away. We couldn’t do a tahara for Tal. It was terrible not being able to do this last rite and give her some kind of closure, so we stood in a silent circle, not sure what to do next. Tal was a vibrant, lovely teenager. She had been Ari’s close friend since nursery school. Her little sister was Ann’s daughter’s best friend. All of our lives were intertwined and losing her so senselessly, so young, felt unbearable. We stood there, speechless, in tears. Seeing Tal like that was more than I had bargained for when I joined the chevra kadisha.

“Her mom just asked us to cut some of her hair,” I said. My voice sounded ripped apart, like a shirt collar that has been torn right before a funeral, as a traditional sign of mourning.

Carefully lifting the sheet, Ann cut off some of Tal’s long, earthy-blond curls.

“Is that enough?” I asked.

“It will never be enough,” Ann whispered.

We unfurled a crisp burial sheet and let it float down around Tal. Yet we lingered, not ready to say good-bye. Then we lifted her into the coffin. Tal had studied dance, she had been graceful and lithe, but it took all our strength to raise her. I remembered Michal’s husband telling me the same thing after Michal died in their home. He said, “The dead are always heavy because the soul has gone and it’s the soul that carries the body.”

I believe that the soul carries the body. As the Lubavitcher Rebbe explained, you can hold a wooden chair in your hands and feel that it exists. But if the chair is burning, you can’t hold the heat and energy that is created from the fire. No substance really disappears, he said, it is transformed, and the same holds true for our souls. I might have drifted away from an Orthodox way of life, but the Rebbe’s concept is proven to me again and again during a tahara. The work fills me with a sense of the inexplicable and the divinely mysterious. A sense that what we do in our lives reverberates, somehow, even after our deaths; and that what we do for the dead has power and resonance. A sense of my place in the chain of Jewish history. And a sense of being gratefully, utterly, miraculously alive.

Sarah is a poet who majored in creative writing at San Francisco State, then went on to get her MFA from the University of San Francisco. She recently completed her credential in early childhood education and works with autistic children. She’s also a human rights advocate, working with organizations devoted to such issues as AIDS in Africa and universal access to education. Sarah grew up in a typically lefty family in (as she calls it) “The People’s Republic of Berkeley.” When Sarah was in junior high her parents split up. Sarah says her father had always been “devoutly Marxist,” and her use of a word usually associated with faith is no accident. When Sarah was a teenager, her father had an epiphany, went through a conversion, and became a zealous Republican. Having observed her father and his radical swings, Sarah grew up to be wary of ideology and dogma.

And yet, when she was in her midthirties, Sarah herself went through a dramatic change. She found herself drawn to Judaism, and finally, inspired by a friend’s conversion, began attending Friday night services at a Reform synagogue in San Francisco. She discovered, though, that she wanted an experience that was more connected to the past, to tradition. She met the Conservative rabbi Alan Lew, who would become her mentor. Now, at forty-four, religious observance is at the center of her life. She moved to be within walking distance of the synagogue, and goes to morning and evening minyan throughout the week.

Sarah is a striking personage. She’s diminutive (shorter than my own five feet), clearly brilliant, and a little ferocious. Severely hearing impaired and suffering from arthritis in her hips, she fights against these impediments with intensity.

Postscript, March 10, 2008: Sarah died the day before this interview was posted. None of us knew until the day after. My conversation with Sarah had started with a discussion of how to deal with sudden, shocking loss spiritually and psychologically; I know that the people who knew and loved Sarah are working to do just that right now. I’m glad that some have used the comments section following the interview to talk about Sarah, and I hope that those who didn’t know her will read the words of those who did.

You and your aunt Barbara were very close. I’m wondering if your religious practice helped you in the aftermath of her death.

I think it did. I’m very comfortable with the fact that Judaism doesn’t have this highly developed idea of what happens after you die, like Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity. I pursued Judaism very much to find meaning, and I think at the heart of that pursuit is the fact that we all walk around with the knowledge that we’re going to die. After my aunt died I discussed it with my rabbi. He was talking about how there are some things that are gone—I’m not going to smell her or have back-and-forth conversations anymore. But he also said, “Pay attention to the ways in which your relationship continues.” Initially I think that the first part made much more sense to me than the second part. But as time went on, I did come to feel that she’s still with me in some way. I can feel her presence sometimes.

What do you understand the Jewish idea of the afterlife to be?

Some of the ideas contradict each other. There’s Olam habah, which means “the world to come.” This one is closest to the Christian idea of heaven, but I think the notion of heaven is a metaphor for communion with God, and hell is basically separation from God. Then there’s the idea that when the Messiah comes the dead will be resurrected. I say the prayer, “Blessed are you, God, you resurrect the dead,” every morning over my coffee. Gilgul hanefesh, the transmigration of souls, makes the most sense to me. It’s basically reincarnation. There is also a belief that the souls of the wicked are tormented by demons of their own creation, or are destroyed at death, ceasing to exist. I very much like the idea of the wicked being tormented by demons of their own creation.

You grew up in a pretty unreligious family and yet you were sent to Hebrew school. How did that come about?

My brother, Jonathan, became of bar mitzvah age. My grandfather was never a religious man, but as he was dying he got more religious—or he started to feel that it was important—and he wanted Jonathan to have a bar mitzvah. And my mom had been feeling like we were not going know what being Jewish was because we were living in Berkeley and not New York. So she sent us to Hebrew school. I got a kind of Judaism 101 out of it. But more than that, when I studied for my bat mitzvah, I got a sense of how Jews study text. I think that really stayed with me. I learned that we have stories about the stories. I learned that sometimes the stories interpret things in ways that are different from the texts themselves; it was like this ongoing conversation. I think that experience had a lot to do with why I started practicing Judaism later.

What do you mean by stories about stories?

Well, my bat mitzvah portion was about the Jews crossing the Sea of Reeds, and having this very celebratory kind of song—which in some ways is a little bit disturbing. They escaped and are about to go into the Promised Land, so it’s very joyous, but at the same time there are all these Egyptians that have died. And there’s a Talmudic story that is often told about how the angels started singing and celebrating with the Israelites and God got very angry with them. He said, you know, my people just died, you shouldn’t be celebrating. So the rabbis were disturbed by the same things that we might be disturbed by.

Do you think the understanding you gained about Judaism as a kid was an intellectual one or a religious one? Or maybe those aren’t separate things at all.

When I was a kid I had a very sort of intuitive connection with God, or whatever language you want to use. And as I got older, it’s not that I lost it, but my idea of what religion was became very overlaid with more fundamentalist ideas that didn’t resonate with me.

You mentioned that you pursued Judaism in order to find meaning. Were there questions that always haunted you?

How do we live an ethical life? How do we live a meaningful life?

Then how, in your search for meaning, did you wind up back with religion? For a lot of people, living ethically and being religious aren’t necessarily tied up with each other.

Judaism is really great for literature geeks because it is like living inside a metaphor. Like on Shabbat, you literally create this stillness before the lights go on, and you have this creation after the stillness. And on Pesach we live out the story of going from constriction to freedom. First, we do this compulsive cleaning, which puts us in a very narrow mind-set. Then we sit down to the Seder with our friends and family, and all this good food—and there’s this sense of liberation. Of course, the Seder itself is a reenactment of the Exodus story: we’re asked to tell the story as if we ourselves were brought out of Egypt.

I’d been living in the Mission [District, in San Francisco], writing poetry and reading it at open mics, really trying to find meaning through literature and sort of living the boho life. And I was writing a lot of letters for Amnesty International, specifically on the death penalty. I got very good at giving the secular explanation of why we shouldn’t have the death penalty. But I started to realize that what I really wanted to say is that it’s bad for the soul of the nation. And there’s no real traditional political language for that, the collective soul. At some point, I read this amazing sermon by Martin Luther King; he wrote it right after the Montgomery bus boycott. Basically he said don’t get on the bus full of braggadocio, because you still have to live with these people. And I kind of realized that that was the sort of political action that I wanted to be a part of. I wanted to recognize the dignity of living. I started exploring synagogues, and then I was very lucky to connect with a rabbi who had things to say that really resonated with me. This was seven or eight years ago.

Three years ago you went to Africa. What took you there?

During my aunt’s last years she lived with the knowledge that her life would probably be shortened. She took up pottery, traveled to Italy—just did all the things she’d always wanted to do, so I took that lesson from her. So now when I have an idea, like “I want to go to Africa,” I don’t put it off until “someday.”

There’s a group called Kulanu, and their mission is finding and supporting Jews in odd places. I went to Africa with American Jewish World Service, and Kulanu funded me. I had gone on shorter trips to El Salvador and India with the AJWS. In El Salvador, which was just a weeklong trip, we helped rebuild houses that had been destroyed in a hurricane. In India, we met with women who were doing amazing things like working on domestic violence and getting children off the silk looms. I knew I wanted to do a longer trip. AJWS has this kind of Peace Corps-like program, and I met someone who had been working with a group called the Abayudayah—which in the Luganda language means “the Jews.”

They’re in a little village outside Mbale in Uganda. They’ve been practicing Judaism since the 1920s. When Idi Amin was in power, they had to practice in secret, so they’re still in some sense rebuilding their community. It’s really inspiring to see, and it was wonderful to be part of it. Africans have this very highly developed sense of hospitality. They’re just really wonderful to be around. When I left, I told them that I hope that they come to America and help us develop hospitality and stronger families and community and vibrant religious life because they’re so rich in those things. I mean, their synagogue rocks. They’ve written African-flavored music to the traditional Jewish liturgy, and it’s awesome.

The ’20s seems fairly recent for a group of Africans to convert. How did that come about?

Initially Semei Kakungulu was the leader of the tribe. I think he was really annoyed with the Christian missionaries. The story is he holed himself up, and he read the Bible very carefully. And he said, “I don’t know about this Christian stuff, but these Israelites, they had the right idea.” So he came out and said, “We’re Jews,” and started practicing. It was kind of a biblical Judaism at first. Over time they met Jews from outside who sort of taught them more Rabbinic Judaism, so they now know what Hanukkah and Purim and things like that are. Recently some Conservative rabbis came and did a formal conversion ceremony. I think we’d actually call it a commitment ceremony because there was a little bit of discomfort with the idea that they had to convert—because they felt like they were born into the religion.

Have they met with any resistance from other Jews?

Yes, in parts of the Orthodox world. The liberal Jewish community has very much embraced them.

Did you find yourself having any resistance to them? Was there something that you think of as being Jewish that they didn’t possess?

It did make me question how much of what I consider Jewish culture is really Ashkenazi culture. A lot of the sort of clichéd things that we say about Jews are not necessarily true about these people. A lot of those cultural things we assume about Jews are really from a particular Eastern European kind of sensibility. I tend to assume that, you know, every Jew has this great library and that they’re voracious readers, but the Abayudayah are subsistence farmers, living a rural, village life. And there wasn’t the love of argument that you find among Jews here. There’s more of that veneer of African politeness.

It seems like you’ve found a religious structure for doing political work.

I think there’s a really fine line, and that a lot of what is going on now in our country around combining religion and politics is actually very dangerous. So it’s not about, you know, “God wants you to vote for the Green Party.” In my mind, it’s more about the way in which you fight the battle. Also at the heart of Judaism is Abraham’s vision of oneness, the idea that we’re all deeply connected. I think that is at the heart of things for those of us who pursue social justice. We feel that we’re not isolated, that what we do affects people across the globe. And as the world changes, that’s truer and truer.

Despite her tragic circumstances, Dahlia Finger, the antiheroine of Elisa Albert’s first novel, makes sympathy a tough sell. Diagnosed with a brain tumor at the novel’s start, Dahlia, a classic late-1990s slacker, by turns bored and infuriated with the world, spends her remaining months sponging off her pushover dad, mouthing off to her bitchy mom, watching schlocky movies on cable, and, of course, smoking pot.

In the movies, at least, the threat of imminent death tends to prompt epiphany-filled transformation, but in Dahlia’s case it serves only as further confirmation that the world really sucks. Still, The Book of Dahlia, streaked with dark, irreverent humor, ultimately proves surprisingly moving. Despite her flaws—and there are many—we fervently wish for Dahlia to live.

Nextbook’s Ellen Umansky talks to Albert about the origins of her novel, the role terminal illness has played in her own family, and the utter inadequacy of self-help books in the face of staggering problems.