Dying Is Absolutely Safe*

No greetings in a house of mourning

My father in law holding my younger child in the hospital, 2016

When I woke up Saturday morning the air was quiet. The light was cold, behind a facade of white cloud. I picked up the phone on my bedside table. My husband had texted at 1:14 am from his father's hospital bedside. “He’s gone.”

And so we entered a liminal space.

In Jewish law, time and its obligations stop briefly for the living as well as the dead.

Aninut is the Jewish word for the period after someone close to you has died, and before the burial. In Jewish tradition, that burial takes place as quickly as possible.

During this spell, the bereaved person is exempt from time-bound commandments, such as offering blessings before and after meals, and praying morning, noon, and night. Commandments from which many Jews, like us, have long since released ourselves anyway, with most of that time probably disappearing into our phones.

Aninut comes from a Hebrew root that can also mean “to be under pressure.”

I have been feeling this pressure. As a daughter in law, my hands have been very full each day with the tasks of mourning. I told my children their grandfather was dead. I hugged them while they cried. I covered our large mirror over the mantelpiece. I reached out to our shul for help planning the funeral. I ordered a seven day shiva candle from Amazon. I laid out the program. I helped my husband compare translations of Psalm 23. We went with the classic, “The Lord is my shepherd.” I drafted the email to friends and family, and responded to their responses. I ordered food, of course. It’s hard to cry when your mouth is full of cream cheese. I held my husband’s hand, rubbed his back, took over the trash and the compost.

COVID, among its other impacts, was a mass orphaning event. So, when I reported my book The Stolen Year I spoke to bereavement counselors who work with children. These people are a little like angels. One of them explained to me that he followed Alan Wolfelt’s philosophy of “companioning.” This made me think of walking with someone into the dark woods of their feelings, not trying to lead them out.

Wolfelt writes:

“If your desire is to support a fellow human in grief, you must create a "safe place" for people to embrace their feelings of profound loss. This safe place is a cleaned-out, compassionate heart. It is the open heart that allows you to be truly present to another human being's intimate pain.”

Trying to keep my heart open this week, I listened to a podcast interview with Francis Weller, who wrote The Wild Edge of Sorrow. He said our modern society is obsessed with “amnesia and anaesthesia.”

Joining in community regularly, sharing each other’s grief, keeps you current, Weller says–current with your feelings, also immersed in the current of life, also plugged into the jolt of life. It widens your emotional amplitude: more fully expressed sorrow means more fully expressed joy. I see that in my eight year old, whose tears fell like rain when she first heard the news. She has this in common with her grandfather–unrestrained emotion of all kinds, and with it, a great love for life.

Weller also says that as a civilization, we are descending into The Long Dark. In other words, polycrisis. In other words, collapse. Currency with grief, then, is a crucial spiritual technology, a community skill for this moment.

For Climate Mental Health Network, I’ve been working on a draft of climate and ecological grief resources created by Panu Pikhala, based on his scholarship. He defines the grief of this time as complicated, which is a psychological term of art. For example, if your ex-husband dies, or if your parent was abusive or mentally ill, your grief might be complicated.

With climate, war, and the ongoing degradation of our political system, losses are both tangible and intangible, ambiguous, nonfinite. There is the loss of an envisioned future, loss of assumptions, loss of certainty. We grieve things that haven't happened yet, and our grieving goes on without end.

This is all illuminating, but our responses remain the same. Grieve with your body and grieve with other people.

On Tuesday, we drove to the cemetery. The sky was a palimpsest of clouds. There was a gravestone with the surname of my husband and children. Our officiant sang beautifully, but no sound reverberates like a shovelful of dirt hitting a pine box at the bottom of an open grave.

At human scale, mourning rituals are based on a careful calibration of nearness and distance from loss. There are the bereaved, and those who comfort the bereaved. In a Jewish context, for example, the wife, the siblings, the parents, and the children rend their garments. The in-laws–me–do not.

We are all connected in concentric circles. When one person leaves, the whole web trembles, making its connections felt. My parents came to support me. My sister-in-law’s mother-in-law came to support her. Valentina, the woman who cared intimately for not only my father-in-law, but both his parents in their old age, came. The young woman with the hijab who delivered the food from Bagel Point sent by my uncles and aunts became part of our circle. So did all our friends who came to sit shiva with us, and the children in my daughter’s Hebrew school class who wrote condolence notes, and the person watching my parents’ dog back home.

What happens when loss comes at an inhuman scale? Who will care for us when we are all bereaved? Those are my questions, today as I dwell in this house of mourning.

*From Ram Dass.