The Blessing of Sorrow Read online

  There is no scientific or other evidence that any casket with a sealing device will preserve human remains.

  There was an elaborate presentation of cremation urns for purchase, some traditional-looking (wood, ceramic, marble, metal), and others ranging in shape from reading lamps, birds, fish, butterflies, baseball mitts, golf clubs, harps, sewing machines, ice skates, footballs, cooking skillets, motorcycles, smoking pipes, firefighter hats, and “veteran urns”—a bronze combat helmet sealed across a pair of rough-hewn military boots. There are also biodegradable urns available, in keeping with those who are environmentally concerned.

  The artistic flair and creativity of the themed urns vanished quickly when, following our sojourn in the element-controlled embalming chamber, Debbie walked me over to the crematorium. It was just outside the password-monitored door. It was noticeably warm in this space—the sliding vault-like cover of the daunting, gloomy-grayish oven was half-open, spewing a smoldering fire and end-of-days smoke. I looked inside and beheld a spread, smoldering heap of ashes and burnt bones.

  “Oh,” Debbie said, referring to the crematory operator, “I guess he just finished cremating somebody, so it’s going to need to cool down.”

  “How long does this process take?” I asked.

  “About two and a half hours. Yeah, it’s pretty hot so he must have had three today.” Debbie then showed an anteroom with a curtained window, a couple of chairs, and a couch. The window looked directly into the oven. “This is the Witness Room,” she explained. “This is where the family can witness the procedure.”

  I was startled at first. “You mean they see the actual cremation?”

  “No,” Debbie answered calmly. “Just the placement of the body.” We talked briefly about this moment of observing that offers loved ones the opportunity to say goodbye. I thought there was a significant amount of sensitivity in this otherwise surreal set-up. I wondered aloud to my friend if anybody did stay on and watch the incineration. She said, “We don’t like them to sit in here for too long. But there are some who linger a bit.” Then, referencing the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, which regularly turn to cremation, she added, “Sometimes the monks will stay here but we don’t interfere with their prayers and rituals.”

  Then Debbie pointed to the ashes and bones that lay anonymously in the oven, indicating more responsibilities of the crematory operator. “So this one is cooling down. And then he will put it in the processor, process it, and from there he will remove it and place the remains into the selected urn27—you see, there are the urns lined up there. And every person, before they are cremated, has to be weighed and then they are placed on that scale you see over there and their remains have to be weighed and the difference recorded.”

  “This is monitored and documented very carefully?” I asked.

  “Oh yes.”

  And then I noticed an oversized toolbox labeled, unsurprisingly, CREMATORY TOOLBOX. “Yes, there are tools there for both the prep room and crematory,” Debbie said. All of the implements intermingled, all being essential for the scrupulous embalming and refurbishing, the draining and cosmetics and biohazards, and then the incineration. So it was apparent that all these critical, funereal tasks were intertwined at the mortuary—from fluids to ice to fire. And all of them inscribed in meticulous codes, formulas, and documentations.

  Debbie and I now sat in her modest, impeccably tidy office. Prominent were photos of her children and grandchildren. It was late afternoon, and I asked her what kind of day she had experienced. “Fairly typical,” she replied. She had spent time on the cemetery grounds, inspecting and noting any necessary repairs and landscaping issues, as well as the constant monitoring of ground sinking and water levels beneath the tombstones. There had been an “education session” that she supervised among the graves for her colleagues in the Dignity Memorial chain. She was showing properties to some of the newer sales professionals. “We have a new section of burial properties on the grounds and we just wanted to go over it and give them information on pricing, availability, casket options, permissions, and the like. It was an overview of the process. It took a couple of hours. All in the day of the life.”

  Debbie chuckled amiably, but her work is rigorous and certainly atypical. She has done it all in her thirty-plus years in the mortuary culture, from collecting the deceased from homes, hospitals, and county morgues to the intake of bereaving families, embalming, dressing of corpses, including the application of cosmetics and reshaping of collapsed jaws and smashed heads, to coordinating services, recruiting clergy, garnering death certificates and coroner permits, to overseeing burials, and comforting—even physically holding up—mourners. She has diligently learned about all the distinctions and requirements and sensibilities among myriad faith communities—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Eastern traditions—including the significant variations in practice among the denominations themselves. A Baptist funeral is not the same as a Catholic Memorial Mass; an Orthodox Jewish service is decidedly dissimilar, in rhythm and timing and substance, than one from the Reform branch of Judaism.

  There was an occasion years ago when I particularly observed Debbie’s transcendent empathy and kindheartedness. I was performing a funeral for a Sephardic Jewish family at Eternal Hills Memorial Park. The gentleman being eulogized was about to be transported from the main complex to the cemetery; it was going to be a graveside service. His widow suddenly became markedly agitated. “I forgot! I forgot!” she cried.

  Both Debbie and I approached the suffering woman. Debbie put her arms around the lady and gently inquired, “What did you forget, Mrs. Gabarda? How can we help you?”

  Mrs. Gabarda, her tears streaking her heavy makeup, looked at both of us. “I forgot to give you this for my husband.” She held up a worn but still regal, full-sized prayer shawl, known as a tallit. “Can we possibly still put it on him, before he is buried?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Debbie.

  “I want to be there when you do it,” said Mrs. Gabarda. Debbie nodded toward me. She and I took the lady, clutching the old tallit in her hands, to a small anteroom that was adjacent to the crematorium. We strode outside the building so as to avoid any possible missteps. The three of us walked in, and Debbie, first gently eyeing the widow, opened the relatively simple coffin. Mr. Gabarda lay peacefully within. Debbie carefully took the shawl from the lady and then directed me with her eyes to help her wrap it around the man’s shoulders. Mrs. Gabarda’s lips trembled as we silently completed the task. She then nodded and asked, “May I say goodbye again?”

  “Of course,” replied Debbie. The widow leaned over and touched the tallit and then ran her hands across his still, bearded face. “Now you can go to God, Jacob.”

  Debbie is respected for both her seniority and experience, and she sometimes trains and updates her peers on matters of professionalism and best practices (legal and ethical standards) in the funeral business. She had spent a portion of the day on auditing issues and, as she put it, “putting out a couple of fires” between employees. Debbie is as firm on employee comportment as she is compassionate with grieving clients. I asked why she chose this profession and discovered, again, how people—even funeral directors—best remember others when they turn their grief into work that reflects their departed.

  Debbie responded, “I got into this work because my dad died. Instead of going to nursing school, I went to mortuary college. So I’ve worked my way up from just working with the body aspect of it to making sure the body is well treated. My father was an alcoholic, unfortunately, with liver damage. The embalming process over thirty-five years ago was poorly done, and very difficult to take.” Debbie was dismayed by the insensitivity and incompetence of the mortuary staff and made an immediate life decision. She was going to channel her grief for her father into servicing others in sorrow, making sure they did not suffer the pain she had known.

  “So I made arrangements and thought, well, maybe if I sit across from somebody in the position my family was in a
nd show compassion, show love, no matter who the deceased was, no matter how they died, who they loved, how they were loved. Showing people compassion when they are suffering. I wanted to assure them of that love and caring. I wanted them to know that I was truly with them. That I would treat them the way I wasn’t treated. It was kind of a life calling for me. It’s something special. You have to have patience. You have to not judge any of the families who come before you. You are here to offer them guidance and to be truthful. We are here for those whose lives have ended,” Debbie declared, now almost like a prayer. “Every life has value. It’s not how you start it; it’s how you end it. And it’s not a race. It’s a journey. I believe the Lord led me to this work. God has blessed me with the opportunity of helping others.”

  Debbie is concerned with the tendency of Americans to sidestep the crucial steps and stages of grief. I had asked her what she observed about the American way of mourning.

  “For those who have a faith,” responded this reverent woman, “and believe they will see their loved ones again, what I have noticed is that they tend to let their emotions flow, which is healthy. They tend to follow the five stages of grief a bit stronger than those who don’t. I believe those who don’t have a faith—and even some who do—believe that grieving is some kind of weakness. That you just don’t grieve. That an afterlife is a crutch. That if you show natural emotions, that if you cry, it’s weakness. And I think our society does this too. ‘You have to be strong,’ people say. ‘You are too emotional, too weak. And that’s not good.’ They’re saying that weak people are not good. Our society prevents people from seeing value in paying tribute, in celebrating a life. And I will tell you that some people, planning their service, will just say ‘Ah—put me in a pine box. Don’t make a fuss.’ Or they say, “Ah—just cremate me and throw my ashes out to sea.’ However, that’s what we say. But do we really mean that? We all want to be loved. We all want to be remembered. And so it’s unfortunate that so many Americans tend to shun the grieving process, for different reasons, when it’s so important for them and it’s really what their loved ones wanted them to do.”

  This funeral director feels that Americans endure a lot of tribulation keeping in touch with their feelings because they just haven’t made peace with humanity’s impermanence. “Look, I understand. It really is hard to talk about it. It’s emotional. And then it goes back to our fear of being judged as being weak if we show emotion.”

  Debbie picked up a photo of her grandchildren and smiled. “I’m in my late fifties. I find myself thinking about my own death. It tugs at me, of course. So I’m actually grateful when people, when they come here, are already crying. When there are tears, I know I have something to work with.”

  24 I did not pursue a career as a preplanner for the funeral consortium. My interest was to learn more about what people go through and how they are treated while contracting such an agreement—for my own professional edification.

  25 There are people—and a few morticians—who vigorously decry embalming. They feel it is somewhat theatrical and that, for purposes of grief therapy, human corpses should actually not be made to look “alive.” “A chemically preserved body looks like a wax replica of a person. Bodies are supposed to be drooping and turning very pale and sinking in while decomposing. Within a day or so after someone died, you should be able to see that this person has very much left the building. That’s the point. I think dead bodies should look dead. It helps with the grieving process.”—Los Angeles funeral director Caitlin Doughty, as quoted in WIRED Magazine, September 17, 2014.

  26 In this case, it’s her real name, and the actual memorial park in suburban San Diego.

  27 In 2004, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) implemented rules for transporting urns as carry-on luggage, requiring that urns must pass successfully through the X-ray machines.

  Chapter Seven

  Prayerful Communication: Are There Conversations with the Dead?

  “The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.”

  Seneca

  As I concluded my visit with Debbie Allen that afternoon, I asked her a last question: “Debbie, do you believe in an afterlife?”

  She responded immediately, “I believe in heaven.” She didn’t specify what that meant but it was clear this sympathetic mortality professional trusts that there is something more to our existence than what we can see.

  Just a few weeks after my father died, I lay in bed half-asleep, the clock ticking near midnight. A fragrant April breeze floated through the open windows; spring blossoms were emerging following the final frost of March. Now I felt, without a trace of trepidation, that something else flowed in with the breeze.

  Looking up toward the ceiling, I saw particles of light swirling above me. It was a most consoling and soothing sight. The glowing particles, like atoms of intimacy, began to shape themselves into something. I lay and watched, feeling the presence of a commiserating medium. The lights took on a softly luminous silhouette of my father’s face, suspended above the bed and me. I felt no apprehension, only great curiosity and interest.

  There was no audible sound, yet I experienced the intonation of words being conveyed to me as the silhouette hovered for a moment. “I am fine and safe.” The words silently penetrated my psyche and warmed my soul. The grains of light dispersed and evaporated. Only the breeze flowed through the dark room. I was filled with relief and satisfaction. I then turned over and fell into a peaceful sleep.

  Encounters with Hope and Love

  Writing these words now, more than forty years later, I find no second-guessing occurring in my mind. I have been with many serious, rational people who were recovering from loss and reported similar experiences. They know that life is for the living and that physical death is final and that grief must be respected and fulfilled. And yet, I remember a swirling galaxy of lights that came to me in my bedroom with my father’s visage and told me not to worry about the other side.

  So I was not too skeptical when Reva, an upbeat hairdresser with a firm grasp of reality, told me that her mother detects the smell of her late father’s cherry pipe tobacco fumes in the house where the parents once shared life. I do not doubt that the dead have departed from us and that we must therapeutically recover from loss. But I’m not sure we can disavow the fingerprints they sometimes leave behind. Nor do I dismiss Reva’s own report that, in a dream, she dialed her parents’ phone number and, after no one answered on the other end of the line, she awoke with her father’s voice, like a clarion, ringing in her ear: “Hello?”

  Janette is a successful writer, respected editor, and a mother who has taken life earnestly. She loved her own mother fiercely, and she took her time about getting married. In her late thirties, she first met Lenny, whom she thought was the right man, and evidently got a signal from her mother that boded well.

  Sometime earlier, Marianne, Janette’s mother, had been chatting with her daughter over lunch. Janette was worried about her mother, a gregarious woman who had smoked cigarettes far too long, quit too late, and was falling prey to lung cancer. Marianne was always fretting about Janette’s gentlemen callers. On this occasion, she came up with an unusual criterion for Janette to consider when it came to men: “You ought to see if he ever asks you about your car.”

  “My car?” Janette was perplexed.

  “Yes, your car. It’s a practical, daily matter. A man who thinks of such things, especially with respect to his woman, is functional and wonderful. Remember that.”

  It was several months later, after Marianne died, that Janette met Lenny. It was late fall. While they were having dinner out together one evening, he said, “I have something to ask you.”

  “Okay,” replied Janette.

  “Tell me, have you had your car winterized yet? It’s pretty important and can save you a lot of headaches and money later.”

  Janette blinked away her tears of joy. She felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder as she looked into he
r future husband’s face. Yes, we do hear from the dead.

  But it was just after Marianne had succumbed that Janette particularly felt her mother’s proximity. A few days after the funeral, Janette went to her mother’s apartment—a space the two had shared on many occasions and through many crises, transitions, and milestones. This was the first time Janette would sleep alone in the apartment.

  At about 4:00 in the morning, Janette awoke and went into the bathroom. “I felt a sort of cool swirl,” she told me. “I couldn’t discern what it was. But I felt my mother in the room with me. She was absolutely there. I didn’t get scared. I didn’t get upset. It felt right. I felt her essence. There wasn’t exactly a sound but I heard her talking to me. She said, ‘This is me. I don’t want you to worry. I am here for you. I will always guide you. I will only come to you this one time but I want you to know that I am always with you.’”

  “What happened then?” I asked Janette, vividly recalling my father’s swirling silhouette.

  “Nothing. It was a wonderful, soothing experience. I just went back to bed and felt deeply reassured.”

  My folksy uncle Moshe (introduced in Chapter One and who helped me with my grief) suffered a shocking loss of his own when his second son, Uli, died. My cousin was in his mid-thirties, frolicsome and easygoing, but lived with a congenital heart defect. Uli’s rather sudden demise was not altogether unexpected but it was dreadfully unsparing for his young wife and their three small children. He was truly a moderate man, soft in tone and without affectation.

  On his last day on earth, Uli actually succumbed twice. He was considered technically dead early in the afternoon, and then he was miraculously revived by the medical team. He relapsed unconditionally early that evening, even as his family briefly celebrated the uncanny reprieve. But in between the coda and the curtain, Uli had told a remarkable tale to his hearkening wife.