The Blessing of Sorrow Read online

  The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, writing from Vienna, once backhandedly and unflatteringly compared how Americans and Europeans conceptualize the bereavement process. He was alerting the bereaved not to depreciate the grieving process: if not respected and experienced, “it becomes as hollow and empty as an American flirtation in which it is understood from the beginning that nothing is to happen, in contrast to a continental [European] love affair in which both partners must always bear in mind the serious consequences.”3

  I ask: Why fear death? You are going back to the same place you were before you were born. Do you fear that place? It was but a peaceful void. You were invulnerable to any agony or distress. To not exist is to not suffer and to not bear burdens. When people die, grieve for them fully but then let them go. Nothing else from this life can happen to them.

  And nothing clarifies the fact that we are all simply human beings more than the universal denominator of mortality. A cemetery is a field of souls and there is no theology planted in its grasses and hills, only the tenderness of memory. A common practice in a communal cemetery is to maintain Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sections. I respect that, but I don’t believe land can be divvied up doctrinally. I admire the Native American philosophy that the earth is as whole and as unbound as the sky. The earth has no liturgy but its silence. Grief is the completed language of life.

  When my father died, my family was suddenly faced with the questions every family or individual deals with at such a time. What do we do? When should the service take place? Should we follow religious procedures or not? Where do we have the service? Should it perhaps simply be a graveside ceremony? (My young father did not make these kinds of arrangements in advance with something the funeral conglomerates call “pre-needs.”)

  In our case, there was no question my dad would be interred—the very next day. We belonged to an Orthodox synagogue, requiring burial within twenty-four hours. The cemetery experience was a walk through numbness and barely comprehended emotions. It remains a blurred memory for me. It failed to initiate the therapy of grief. It was just a series of recitations and obligatory actions all set to a twenty-four-hour clock. We followed a somber doctrinal formula that serviced our need to lay my father to rest, but it did nothing to address our emotions and agony.

  Many families struggle today in a different way—particularly in this society of constant choices and unfettered options. Should it be a burial or a cremation? Or perhaps some alternative method or venue should be considered? In America, even death has been conjoined to the entertainment and youth cultures. It shouldn’t be too sad—maybe it could be even a little entertaining. And customary funerals are known to be very costly.

  I have labored side-by-side with people in the funeral industry for a long time. Most of them are earnest, meticulous individuals who regard their work with gravitas and display high standards. They listen carefully to the family members they serve, are attentive to unusual requirements and special requests, and speak gently and with an appropriate level of pastoral kindness. From day to day—and sometimes in the middle of the night—they interact with a gamut of distraught human beings who are reacting to somebody’s death in all variety of ways, some rational and others erratic and volatile.

  It’s all bewildering and confusing because in the United States, bereavement is much more successful as a business for mortuaries, casket companies, and cemetery properties than it is therapy for deeply sorrowful and needy survivors. We just don’t commiserate much about death. About forensics and murders we are saturated with media and documentaries. Anti-aging ointments and vanity treatments to artificially recreate youth are rampant. We rarely consider the stern mental health consequences of avoiding grief because we much prefer youth and vitality, and we too often simply dispatch our aging and dying parents to hospitals or “old age homes”—where they finish their lives in the hands of skilled, caregiving strangers and mostly out of our view.

  Funerals and Bereavement Practices

  As in any enterprise, there are unfortunate exceptions among these people and there are a few trends that betray the “bottom-line” aspect of the business. Some funeral marketers might pitch you a sailboat-shaped coffin, replete with the contour of a hull and a rudder if Dad was a mariner—one of several, new-wave, amusing, pricey, theme-based alternative burial boxes. One funeral home I worked with for many years maintained a special display in its Casket Room—a Marsellus 710 mahogany casket that was elegant and had a brownish stain and semi-gloss finish. “This is the exact same model of casket that President Kennedy was buried in,” the service adviser would tell mourners.

  Or you can go online to order what is advertised as a “fan-based” Star Trek coffin, embellished with all the graphics in color. The site selling this model as well as a Grand Theft Auto unit declares that the Star Trek casket “will not get old.” You can sign on to eBay and personally order a “RARE Antique Child’s Burial Casket Coffin Pine Wood Box Colonial New York City.” The list price in 2016 was $1,495.95. These unique last resting places may offer a bit of whimsy during an inconsolable time; however, I feel they offer little dignity and negligible clinical recuperation. Maybe it’s one reason an inside joke among some funeral executives is that the first three letters of funeral spell “fun.”

  The whole funeral culture is a rather sad symptom of why, in 2016, Time magazine termed America as “a radical democracy of personal choice.” While there are important options and methods involving grief, what’s sometimes lost upon many of us is that there are no options not to grieve. We can choose what condiments we want on our fast-food hamburgers or what luxury features we prefer in our new automobile, but there is no poll about death. It is absolutely certain.

  Today’s sometimes-outlandish bereavement practices didn’t originate in the Hebrew Scripture. They are the products of American mercantilism. In Genesis, we read that Sarah, the wife of Abraham, dies. The Bible then tells us, simply, “And Abraham came to cry for her, mourn for her, and eulogize her.” That’s it. No frills, devices, add-ons, or commercial gimmicks. The widower unpretentiously wept (a good message for men who are reluctant to shed tears in public), lamented, and told her life story—the first record of a eulogy in biblical literature. This was the beginning of an eventual emotional recovery because Abraham took hold of his pain immediately and naturally. And he spoke about it.

  Recovering emotionally through fulfilled grieving is a significant issue in the medical community. Physicians in America are not encouraged to cry or display their anguish; it’s considered a sign of weakness or helplessness that is not tolerated by some peers. Depression, dysfunction, and even suicide are more common than generally known. One doctor wrote:

  In medicine, crying is unprofessional. That needs to change—now. A premedical student volunteering in the local ER tells me about a female physician who cried after losing a child. He thought her behavior was unprofessional. I asked him to consider “Who did she harm by crying?” Meanwhile, a physician tells me she’s been cited for unprofessional conduct for crying at work. Her boss told her, “Unless you are dying, crying is unprofessional behavior and not to be tolerated.” Some physicians and young doctors-in-training are uncomfortable with tears. Grieving is a healthy reaction to sadness. Humans bond through shared pain. Please do not punish your colleagues for their willingness to be vulnerable with grief-stricken families. Real doctors cry.4

  Today, the potentially sanitizing term “a celebration of life” is used in place of memorial or funeral, and is often dictated by family members. I always honor the request because I have respect for people’s sensibilities. But I retain some concerns about this phrase. I have conducted memorials in places as disparate as hotel ballrooms, bars, arboretums, zoological gardens, picnic parks, along the seashore, at home, and, of course, in chapels and at graveside ceremonies.

  Regardless of the location or method of sending a loved one to eternity, no matter what music is played, slide shows presented, or what the eul
ogists say or forget to say, most every funeral ends the same way: the grievers, in injured stillness, go home to a contorted world as the house fills up with overflowing platters of food and the strangely melancholy aroma of brewing coffee. For the newly bereaved, the menu is loneliness and, though people encircle them, they suffer quietly like soulless outcasts.

  Grief is the emotional blood that must circulate through the body and be cleansed by the spiritual yearnings that inhabit our psyches. There is no definitive approach just as there is no one particular way to lead a life. One unusual practice—formerly evident among French Jews—is a compelling paradigm of how to weave grief effectively into the tapestry of everyday life.

  The Table of Life

  A tradition in some French-Jewish communities was for the men to construct a table from any good and suitable wood that would be used for family gatherings and on which to enjoy their meals. Each man would do so knowing that his coffin would one day be built from the wood of that very table. I think about this custom from time to time—especially in twenty-first-century America, where sorrow and mourning are rarely discussed or planned for.

  Picture the imagery: a man’s family and friends come to his funeral and see his casket, which was once the table where they had sat and talked and laughed and cried. Grief is therapeutic and healing when it has handprints all over our lives, when it is part of the subconscious long before it comes along with its pain and desolation.

  The origin of this table-to-coffin notion, found in the Talmud, is that since the Jews no longer had the Temple in Jerusalem—it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE—“a person receives atonement through his table.” The kitchen table is where a person can give nourishment to others, invite the poor to come and eat, bless family members, and generally share his or her bounty and good fortune. Or it can be the center of emotional indigestion and spiritual hunger. As plates are filled and conversations ensue, souls mingle or bump into each other most directly. You learn a lot about people who will eventually die, after the days and evenings spent around the tabletop. You will have tender details to remember—the shape of their hands, their trademark fragrance, a piece of music they hummed, classic phrases they repeatedly invoked—thus keeping them spiritually alive.

  Most of us can recall the kitchen table of our childhood and adolescence. Stories were told, anger was flashed, quarrels were resolved, or people broke up with each other and someone left the table in a huff. We saw and heard our parents up-close and without ceremony; they cajoled one another, interrogated us kids, declared rules, expressed their love, bickered about finances, and they certainly disciplined us. It wasn’t always congenial but it was real and some things spoken there have never been forgotten. The table was a kind of sanctuary of personal history. The table is still the landscape of truths, sullen and blissful.

  What you do and say at the kitchen table, how you behave, how you degrade or inspire others, become the etchings of other people’s memory and the libretto of their grief when you die. One’s eulogy is inscribed over the years in the clanking plates and cutlery, the steaming soups, the briskets or tofu-turkeys, the exceptionally celebrated maternal entrees, the romantic anecdotes, the generational stories, the weeping, the shouting, and the forgiving. Even the matter of who prepares the meal and how the table is set define the rhythm of real life in a household.

  It wasn’t always pleasant at the meals, but it was tangible and some things spoken there have never been discarded. Converting the table’s wood into a coffin eternalized the nuances of a human being and serviced the mourners who, at the funeral, literally beheld the same planks around which they had sat for decades. It was not about the mortuary or the formulaic obituary or the lofty tributes of designated speakers. It was certainly not about how long or ornate was the table of someone’s life. It was about what the table was made of.

  So wherever this practice prevailed, the builder of the table, chopping and refining the wood, designing the pattern, smoothing the corners, knew from the start that he was also creating a legacy derived from the exact lumber of his efforts.

  In the end, life and death evolve from the trunks and branches of the same tree. There is a protecting shade about grief and—if bereavement is anticipated and contemplated—it will provide us with the fruit and nourishment of healing. We start with the realization that there can be no tree of life without a seed being planted. Grief and memory are the natural alchemy that renews the table of life even after someone has left it.

  A Righteous Deed

  The requisite and pressing group of relatives and friends crowd the house, eating, drinking, and awkwardly uttering clichés (“He’ll be missed”; “She is in a better place”). Most people do mean well and try to say something sincerely felt. But it’s ultimately a social gathering, because we Americans—who know so much about sex, politics, good wine, travel, the movies, and the National Football League—just don’t know how to talk about death. It’s as if we have embraced what Epicurus said in the fourth century BCE, “Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here.” We really have the tendency to simply dismiss death for as long as possible even though it is life’s absolute equal. Then, to our amazement, it is here.

  When at a house of mourning, some visitors will seek a bit of solace as they engage in conversations about a variety of banal subjects. Avoiding the obvious situation, they prattle about the news, the stock market, their kids’ soccer championship, and, of course, the weather. When you are a mourner, you are allowed to let people know that you are too tired for any further conversation. You do not need permission to graciously announce you are done and are going to bed.

  The most beneficial and remedial gatherings at home after a funeral involve mostly silence. People sitting together, offering few words but generally keeping quiet, transmit the strongest and certainly the most honest message. We are here. We care.

  Don’t get me wrong. There is real consolation in having people around after the trauma of a burial and they should be welcomed and thanked. People just have to think about how to visit well. It’s not a get-together; it’s a righteous deed. Because soon enough the hardest part comes for the bereaved: the last guests leave, the door shuts for the last time, and the survivors or the individual suddenly widowed find themselves in a terrible new darkness. There is his toothbrush sitting in its slot on the sink. Her dresses and shoes hang and lie forlorn in the closet. There is a gaping absence in the bed where he would lie and sleep every night. Even the abandoned pillow seems to be weeping.

  Inside a Terrible New Darkness

  This might be the loneliest moment in someone’s life. None of the kindly or just meandering talk with all the visitors really relieved anything—even in its sincerity. There is but a hole in our hearts—we who have been thrust into bereavement.

  French novelist Colette wrote, “It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer . . . and everything collapses.”5

  After the house or the reception hall empties, the family members are left with the gnawing, sometimes debilitating, acutely painful realization, “I don’t know what to do. Should I be stoic and just carry on? Should I just stay home and weep for several days? When should I return to work? How many days away from everything are appropriate? Should I turn to prayers and ceremonials that I really am not familiar with? Shall I seek out clinical help or join a support group?

  In the case of my father, I got some help with my anguish—not from the rabbi who spoke at his burial and confused my father’s first name with mine, and not from a therapist or grief counselor (although these are essential professionals, many of them extremely proficient and wise, who can drive the necessary process of real grieving). My religion offered rituals that were ancestrally soothing (a daily service every evening in our home
for a week; covered mirrors; small, stiff seats for us mourners; memorial candles; the inevitable, endless trays of deli) but I soon got two better remedies that launched my recovery. The first was a solo walk in a park, and later, a visit from my astute uncle, who arrived from Israel.

  A day or so after the house had emptied of callers and the emptiness began to fill our home like a gloomy fog, I got into my car and began to drive. I found myself at a familiar, hilly, and verdant public park. French Park began as a private estate in the early 1900s. It had the family mansion, thick woods, endless meadows and trails, and was a regular gathering place for my chums and me during our high school years. My dad favored it for an occasional family picnic; he and I would often hike along its creeks and under dogwoods, elms, and buckeyes, discussing life, my future, and his work as an aerospace engineer during those early, heady days of manned space flight.

  My grief spilled into the shrubs and Japanese roses more naturally than it had during the daily, book-bound mourning prayers at the synagogue with my younger brother, and certainly more unreservedly than at the house teeming with concerned friends. I could see my dad and me throwing a baseball back and forth in this park during earlier, happier spring times. I could hear him calling us kids back from the nearby thicket and announcing that the hot dogs were ready while ordering me to open up the cooler with the Coca-Colas. I could see his thick, dark, curly hair that would never be streaked with gray because he died so young.

  I arrived at French Park’s popular shelter, where parties were often thrown. Mercifully, today it was all my own. A forgiving breeze filled up the space and I thought I detected the pleasant scent of my father’s trademark Mennen “Afta” aftershave lotion. The shelter became my synagogue.