Good grief – that’s the Jewish way of mourning

Jews are good at death. This is not to say that Jews are good at dying, although we’ve had plenty of practice over the years if one measures from the dawn of time to the present day. We bury our dead as quickly as is humanly possible, there is little focus on an afterlife and we mourn publicly surrounded by friends and family. Death, like comedy and arguing, seems to be something that Jews undeniably do well.

In my youth, I was taken to a “practice funeral”, the burial of someone I barely knew in preparation for losing someone I truly cared about at a later date. While I thought this was unique at the time, I would later learn that other friends had similar experiences, a session in the cricket nets of mortality before playing in an actual match.

In a morbid kind of way, it makes sense.

I thought of all this at a shiva recently, that of the father of a family friend who had passed away at the age of 93. Outside of Larry David’s play Fish in the Dark and the film Shiva Baby, the location has rarely been depicted in art and yet the pressure cooker environment and assortment of personalities thrown together in close proximity (sometimes with backstories or broiguses) can sometimes lend the whole thing the air of the Pinteresque.

And yet it all somehow works and feels like closure. There are the mourners seated on low chairs that are thought to symbolise a deviation from normal life brought about by the death of a loved one and also a visual representation of the fact that these family members are “low”. After all, who needs subtext when there’s plain old text? One doesn’t need an English translation on the opposite page for that one.

There is the covering of the mirrors, a tradition that stems from the idea mourners should not be focused on themselves during this period although, as with plenty of Jewish doctrine, it probably needs an update given the presupposition narcissism is limited exclusively to staring at one’s own reflection. In a similar manner to its approach to Jesus, the Torah is conspicuously quiet on social media usage.

There are the bridge rolls and the bad whisky and the stories. Above all else, there are the stories. It seems strange with hindsight but the mourning of my grandparents precipitated some of the biggest laughs I’ve had with the entire family brought together almost exclusively to remember. And when Jews remember, they tend to do so with humour. This is even more true when remembering grandparents or great-grandparents, those who have reached an age where death is sad but not tragic. Who wouldn’t want to go in their nineties surrounded by their family?

Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert B. Weide managed a similar feat with the eulogy for his wife a few years ago that concluded with the words, “For those who never knew her, I’m sorry for your loss.”

As if to prove the point that such occasions need not be sombre, my friend began his speech about his father with the words, “I’m a lucky man because I get to give the eulogy to a hero.” And how lucky were we to hear him deliver it. I had met the deceased on only a handful of occasions but, once his son had finished speaking, I felt as though I knew the man and missed him. Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert B. Weide managed a similar feat with the eulogy for his wife a few years ago that concluded with the words, “For those who never knew her, I’m sorry for your loss.”

The shiva was just a one-night affair since we all make up our own rules and, at 93, the deceased had outlived most of his friends. His son concluded his eulogy with a story about going to Paddington with his father as a seven-year-old: “I thought to watch the trains, but instead I found myself sitting in the dining car of a mainline express hauled by a beautiful maroon locomotive named Western Duke. I thought then that it was the best day of my life. Sixty years later I still do.”

It was a fitting conclusion that told us everything we needed to know about both father and son. It also had something instructive to say about Jewish mourning more generally since the story was not religious or spiritual in any way. It was a memory of a feeling brought about by the man who’d been buried earlier in the day. A feeling, above all else, of being alive.

Not for nothing did many of us greet the end of the eulogy with a hearty l’chaim: We may have been brought together by death, but we were celebrating life.