Journal Entries, Spring 2021
Life Cycle – Death
In the 1800s Alfred Nobel, read his own obituary and saw all the terrible things people wrote about him in the paper. This caused Alfred to change the course of his life and eventually led him to create the Nobel Prizes, to encourage people to strive for the betterment of society. What would your obituary say? What would you like for it to say?
I am worried that my obituary would not have enough to say. But that was a knee jerk reaction. I think my obituary would say lovely things.. I think my friends would talk about loving me and missing me. It would say things about how helpful I am, how caring and passionate, about my love of art and music.
I think I would like it to be able to include stuff about my commitment to justice and some concrete accomplishments around helping people. I want it to include the people I love and people who will live on remembering me. I want it to say that I was a Jew.
Having studied the Jewish understanding behind the rituals of death and dying, in what ways do you imagine the Jewish path through burial and grieving help a surviving individual or family move through this time of healing? Are there ways in which these practices fall short?
We talked about this tonight in class to some extent. These rituals give steps to follow during a very difficult and confusing time. They give an answer for “what do I do now?” These rituals build in the kind of grace and forgiveness we might want from our friends and neighbors at a time when we are not our best selves. They offer guidance for outsiders as well, giving them ideas for how to help the grieving party. They offer physical, spiritual and emotional outlets for pain and suffering.
I love the rending of the garments. I love the acceptance and expectation of a grief so big it leads to destruction. I love the visceral and visible sign of distress. “This is my pain” it says. “This is how big it is. This is how present in my everyday life.”
I think the rituals might fall a little short around holidays. The holidays interrupt shivah and sheloshim, dropping a grieving person in community life again without that time to process and ask for help. They also don’t offer much for people who do better processing alone. Having such a schedule of grief might limit people who hurt longer or force sadness on someone who is ready to move on faster.
I do really like them in general though. “Here is a timetable of what to expect. Here is how and when to ask for help. Here is the world, waiting for you to come back.”