Things not to say to mourners (and some things you can do instead)

by Esther D. Kustanowitz

black-and-white-person-woman

When friends announce on Facebook that a loved one needs prayers, or is in the hospital, or that they’re going through a hard time, I get a sinking feeling. And while recovery sometimes happens, sometimes, it doesn’t. So when I read, “I am heartbroken to announce …,” my heart breaks, and the pain of my own loss reawakens, in sympathy for the end of a life and for what is to follow for those still with us — a year mourning the loss through text, ritual and the communal embrace that is vital, but stands in contrast with grief’s frequent companion: a stark and searing sense of solitude.

Death is part of the organic fabric of life, our liturgy tells us, arriving sometimes in a timely manner and sometimes in a shocking and unexpected instant years or decades too soon. But regardless of the individual circumstances surrounding a loss, family members and friends are left to mourn and to try to move through the grief to live their lives in a new normal.

Jewish rituals provide a year of structure for rudderless mourners, with customs that encourage communal engagement while acknowledging that the year is one in which the mourner is set apart from and different than the embracing community. While this state traditionally lasts a prescribed year, in emotional reality, it tends to linger. Five years after my mother’s death, when people check in on me, I’m grateful; Judaism says that I have been done with mourning for the span of a college education, but that doesn’t mean I’m back to the me I was before. It doesn’t mean that my mother’s absence from the world doesn’t affect me anymore. It’s just different.

I remember those first few months, and how many people, hoping to utter words of comfort, instead spewed forth words of frustration, anger, pain and even insensitivity. They were probably as appalled as I was, but I know — and I hope they know that I know — that their hearts were in the right place. I believe they were so concerned about saying the wrong thing that they often said something even less appropriate.

Each mourner is different. Each grief circumstance is different. Each person finds comfort differently, in different gestures and phrases. But here are seven things — in honor of the traditional seven days of shivah — that everyone should try to avoid saying, along with a few things you can do or say instead to express your love and concern for someone who is experiencing a loss.

Avoid awkward moments engaging the mourner, conversationally or physically. There’s a tradition to leave the conversational initiative entirely to the bereaved, to wait until he or she wants to speak. Some mourners crave the physical embrace of community, while others prefer a spiritual support and company, but not literal embraces (especially from virtual strangers). While challenging to all of us who love words and fear silence, or who are more inclined toward long and crushing hugs to convey what’s in our hearts, sitting quietly in a room next to someone who is grieving can send a powerful, wordless message of presence and support (even if you don’t touch).

“Read” the mourner and be mindful of your relationship with him or her. Are you a close friend, whose embrace the mourner may be expecting, or are you an acquaintance who hugs as an alternative to conversation? If you’re concerned about the potential awkwardness of your physical or verbal interaction, ask the rabbi or a relative what kind of support the mourner may want. You can also ask the mourners if they would like a hug, and don’t be offended if they say no — not everyone wants to be touched by everyone.

Avoid commentary about the illness or the last moments of the deceased. “At least your loved one’s suffering is over” falls into a category of things that people inside and outside the immediate family may think quietly, especially if the deceased has been through a long or public illness, but should not say. Similarly, “at least s/he didn’t suffer,” or “what a blessing that it happened so fast.” You are not the coroner, so don’t offer your opinion on the cause of death or its nature. Instead, sit quietly with the mourner for a while — if there’s an appropriate opening, gently ask the mourner to share their favorite memories or most memorable moments.

Avoid making comments about the afterlife. In some religious communities, it’s comforting to devout people to think about their loved one being “in a better place,” “taking his place at God’s side” or (as I’ve heard religious Christians say) “going to Jesus.” But, emotionally, most mourners do not find comfort in this concept (especially “God needed another angel”). Is there an afterlife? Heaven? Hell? Olam ha-ba, where you study Talmud all day? No one knows; there are too many theological and emotional potholes in grief’s road to cover over with religious speculation about the afterlife. Instead, focus on this life: “I hope the community is the right kind of supportive when you need it. And I’m always available to help you.” (More on this in the next paragraph.)

Avoid: “Is there anything I can do?” Think about the vastness of the word “anything,” and the one thing it cannot include: the return of the lost loved one. Also, offers to help are something mourners receive in abundance at funerals and at shivah, but as time goes on, the offers trickle down to nothing. A year in, people who haven’t been through a loss themselves may assume you’re “fine.” And while you probably will be functional to some degree, at least, you’re probably not “fine.” Instead, if you’re offering assistance, get specific — grocery shopping, picking up kids from school or activities, baby-sitting so that the mourner can have some personal time. Specific offers give the mourner a chance to say “yes” or “no, thanks,” but without challenging them to think deeply about what they need and what you can and cannot provide. And if you’re a friend who really wants to be supportive, offer assistance even after shivah, or during the year of mourning, or beyond, after the offers have faded away but the need for support remains.

Avoid judgmental commentary about the funeral, the shivah or about how the mourner is grieving. 

In many communities, there is variation in how people participate in mourning rituals. For instance, traditionally, shivah is held for seven days (shiv’ah means “seven” in Hebrew) for a close blood relative (parent, sibling or, God forbid, a child) or a spouse, and in a designated year of mourning, traditionally mourners abstain from “celebration.” But some (especially the non-Orthodox) are altering these traditions to fit their lives: sitting shivah for an aunt, uncle or grandparent, or only observing a few days of shivah. People want to connect to Jewish meaning and tradition, but not necessarily in a strictly Orthodox halachic framework. Saying things like “you’re not supposed to” or “not allowed to” grieve in a specific way is counter-supportive: The function of shivah, in particular, is to help the community gather around a mourner for support, not criticize the depth of their feelings or the minutiae of their approach to mourning. So don’t render a judgment as to whether it’s appropriate or halachic. Instead, if you’ve ever been on the inside of a year of mourning, you can offer, “If you ever want to know what helped me, I’m happy to share.” And if you haven’t been, just be there and listen.

Avoid over-empathizing with the mourner’s experience and emotional state. While this comes from a good place, saying, “I know exactly what you’re going through” minimizes the intensity of the mourner’s emotional state and shifts the conversation to being about you. For most mourners, especially at funerals and during shivah, this is not comforting; it’s a negation of their special status in that space. Occasionally, people double down on these kinds of statements, following up with an anecdote about a deceased pet or another “loss” story that isn’t equivalent — because no story of loss is ever really equivalent. Instead, saying, “I can’t imagine how hard this is for you,” or “I know it’s not the same, but I have some experience with loss if you ever want to talk,” is a better approach.

Avoid using shivah as an excuse to badmouth the community or its members. While this might seem a simple enough thing to avoid, the essential awkwardness that people feel when trying to comfort a community member may result in people blurting out things that are unintentionally hurtful. This may include criticizing the eulogies or the funeral service, or gossiping about the community’s failure to let everyone know the funeral was happening. Listen to the mourner. That’s why you’re there, to offer presence, an ear, and words of consolation when you have them. In most cases, that’s enough.

May we all know only simchas. But in the unfortunately inevitable event of a tragedy, let us focus our love and respect on the needs of those who are in the center of the grief circle, and may we as community members take seriously the sacred privilege of helping those who suffer to know that they are not alone.

Complete Article HERE!

How To Bury a War

As the last Holocaust survivor in our family was lowered into the ground, a generation was laid to rest.

By

diner

How do you bury a war?

You start at the Tom Sawyer diner in New Jersey. You sit with a gaggle of relatives, all impacted by their parents and their fists and their fears and their grief. You order matzoh balls and you order cobb salads. No one asks for the bacon held. There are tuna melts and there is cream soda and everyone is American now. This is the beginning.

Once full, and after a funeral where Orthodox Jews and random strangers, where people look like they came, as your uncle will quip, “from central casting,” or Amish country, will gather, you won’t know who they all are.

An old man with a walker will slither across the stage and talk about the stock exchange, about the way the dead played numbers. She, the carrier of war. She, your great Aunt Rayya. She, the very last of the witnesses of the Poland that brought all of you into being. He will cry and glow and make it clear he fell in love with her and her great mathematical mind and you and everyone else will cry without understanding anything.

You will drive in a procession with cousins and aunts and parents and uncles. You will want to climb out of the car even though it is moving.  The graveyard will swallow you into its maze, your parents will play Russian roulette on gravesite discovery — using their “intuition” to find your grandfather’s grave and leading you back to the Paramus, New Jersey highway. No one, without Rayya, will have a compass anymore.

This day, this burial, this earth, this six feet under will mark the beginning and the end, the birth and the death, and you will stand there wondering why you can’t keep your diner food down as they lower her, and the war that shaped her, into the earth. You look at your father and wonder about how he is feeling. Free?  It’s over now, right? No more witnesses to the procession of relatives, no more evidence that they really came in with their bayonets, shuffled them all down a railroad track, and slaughtered everyone, almost everyone, that came before you.

It’s just that there is one way to bury a war and it involves generations and shovels. It involves saying no to the multi-ethnic burial crew with their bulldozers waiting nearby. It means no eating at the grave and gender separate prayer. It means a new order has not yet arrived. Burying the hole. Burying the gap. Burying a life, a woman, a stock market genius, a mystic, a mother. Burying a war involves generations and shovels.

One of your cousins, the circus performer, he is only 12. You will take him near you and note the length of his ponytail. You will whisper in his ear, shovel in hand, “Don’t worry, she left her body already. We aren’t really burying your grandmother.” The shovels are at work by now, in the hands of your bloodline, of their parents. They are passing shovels around.

As dirt thumps on cedar the circus-performing 12-year-old gets brave and grabs his shovel and joins the thud and the drop and the way the group has silently agreed not just to bury this woman but to bury the women and men she knew and that came before her. It is a silent agreement. You will collectively seal the tomb of an entire generation.

You take another cousin close to your chest. She will cry in your arms. You will have to hand your shovel to someone else.

“Did you know,” you will whisper in her ear, “that your grandmother’s family wasn’t ever buried?” You will want to tell her about piles of bodies, about a state-sanctioned memorial of piles of stones, of the way Poland tried to remember the dead with the names of towns or how ironically the Nazis were the only ones dignified enough to list the full names and addresses of their dead.

“This is for them,” you will say as she snots on your chest, as your stomach lurches, as you see your father as a parentless adult child with a shovel.

“This is a proper burial,” your cousin will whisper. “She would have liked this.”

Before you know it the grave is full. There is a mound on top. There is no more dirt to move. Before you know it, she is underground and her soul is no longer here and you are all the new generation with no elder witness. This is when you will oust the rabbi. This is when the gender norms will split. This is about when everyone wants more time at the diner.

“Over my dead body,” you will imagine her saying, about having men and women pray together. You will stand over her dead body and recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, alongside the aunts, all the uncles, the cousins, the strangers.

You will have to run. The bathroom will be your only friend and you will lose your entire diner lunch in one fell swoop. “You will wipe your face, the sweat on your brow.  “Sleep with me tonight?” You hear this as you crack open the stall door. Your cousin will want you in her mother’s bed, “I’m scared,” she says.

You will be sick again. You will slide into the backseat of your parent’s car and whisper, “drive.”  The war is buried now.  You can go home now.  Everyone is now for themselves, carrying what it left behind.  Everyone is now for themselves.

Complete Article HERE!

Physician-assisted dying: A Jewish community perspective

‘It may be impossible to achieve consensus on many of the issues surrounding physician-assisted dying’

By Shimon Koffler Fogel

"Surely we can all agree that every Canadian should have access to other means of alleviating suffering before contemplating a physician-assisted death," writes Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs in Toronto.
“Surely we can all agree that every Canadian should have access to other means of alleviating suffering before contemplating a physician-assisted death,” writes Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs in Toronto.

Physician-assisted dying remains a deeply personal and contentious issue among Jewish Canadians. Some in our community support physician-assisted dying, focusing on the plight of those stricken by a terminal or debilitating illness with no possibility of pain relief. Others oppose physician-assisted dying based on traditional religious grounds or due to concerns about a knock-on effect toward more broadly applied euthanasia.

The Supreme Court of Canada decision in Carter v. Canada recast this vigorous debate by determining that Canadians, under certain circumstances, will have a right to physician-assisted death. The remaining question is how this decision should be implemented.

While there is a vibrant diversity of opinion among Jewish Canadians on this subject, there are also points of unity that reflect common values within broader Canadian society.

Who’s eligible?

One such point of unity comes in the form of concern over the eligibility requirements for physician-assisted dying. Many who support physician-assisted dying base their position on situations of terminal illness or advanced stages of severely debilitating and painful diseases for which there is no relief or cure. However, the Supreme Court decision did not limit physician-assisted dying to such circumstances.

Parliament must now choose between two distinct approaches to physician-assisted dying. The first views physician-assisted dying strictly as an end-of-life option, a means for those who are nearing death to choose how and when to die. This is consistent across all North American jurisdictions where physician-assisted dying is permitted, including Quebec.

The second approach, predominant in European countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, does not restrict physician-assisted dying in this way. In these jurisdictions, children and individuals with psychiatric disorders or minor medical conditions can be eligible for a hastened death — considerations that played no part in the Supreme Court determination.

Quebec’s physician-assisted dying law, which was subject to significant, thoughtful deliberation and passed with strong, cross-party consensus, could be instructive for federal legislation in this context. In Quebec, a patient seeking physician-assisted dying must be competent and fully informed, at least 18 years of age, at the end of life, suffer from an incurable illness, be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability and experience constant and unbearable suffering.

Concerns persist

Even so, significant concerns persist regarding the balance between the right to physician-assisted dying set out by the Supreme Court and the conscience rights of health-care practitioners, including physicians, pharmacists and nurses. Many have deep religious, moral and professional convictions that consider referring their patients to another, willing provider to be an unconscionable act.

Yet Parliament’s special joint committee on physician-assisted dying recommended that, at a minimum, health-care providers who object to physician-assisted dying for reasons of conscience should be required to provide a referral. This disregards the Supreme Court instruction that “the charter rights of patients and physicians will need to be reconciled in any legislative and regulatory response.”

Several viable options have been put forward to balance the seemingly competing rights of patients and health-care practitioners. For example, the Canadian Medical Association has proposed a “separate central information, counseling and referral service” to which objecting physicians would direct patients seeking physician-assisted death. Another possible accommodation would require an objecting physician to notify a designated administrator of their medical institution, who would then be responsible for transferring care in a timely manner.

Others have suggested a model where physicians would be required to report all requests for physician-assisted death to a government body that would have a registry of physicians to whom it could refer patients.

Pleasing all parties

Whatever the specific approach, with creativity and thoughtfulness, the rights of objecting physicians and patients can be harmonized. What’s more, such a process would likely facilitate improved access to physician-assisted dying for patients. The Canadian Medical Association estimates that 30 per cent of its members would be willing to provide physician-assisted death. However, it is unlikely that the remaining 70 per cent would know to whom they should refer a patient. A third-party agent would be well-suited to ensuring timely patient access while preventing the violation of physicians’ conscience rights.

Regardless, physician-assisted dying must not be the only, nor the default, end-of-life option available to patients. While respecting the division of jurisdictional responsibilities, the federal government should do its utmost to ensure that palliative care of the highest quality is universally accessible and that first-rate psychosocial supports are made available to all Canadians separately from physician-assisted dying. While it may be impossible to achieve consensus on many of the issues surrounding physician-assisted dying, surely we can all agree that every Canadian should have access to other means of alleviating suffering before contemplating a physician-assisted death.

Complete Article HERE!

For Jewish Students, Field Trip Is Window on Death and Dying

By

Rochel Berman
Rochel Berman explained traditional Jewish burial shrouds to students from Yeshiva High School during a visit to the Gutterman Warheit Memorial Chapel in Boca Raton, Fla., on Tuesday.

 

Two yellow buses pulled away from Yeshiva High School here with a couple of class periods still left and the 77 seniors aboard giddy with the words “field trip.” They texted. They posed for selfies. They sent up clouds of chatter about weekend plans.

Then, less than a half-hour later, they walked into a cool, tiled room at the Gutterman Warheit Memorial Chapel and stared at the pine coffins and the inclined metal table used for cleaning a corpse.

“I thought I was cool about death,” one girl whispered to a classmate. “But this ——”

“This” meant more than the contents of the room, which is used at the Jewish funeral home for the body-washing ritual called tahara. It connoted the entire mini-course that she, along with the rest of Yeshiva High School’s graduating class, is taking about the Judaic practices and traditions surrounding death, dying and grief.

Few subjects run more powerfully counter to an American teenager’s innate sense of immortality than a confrontation with the reality of life’s end. The study of death became more common at the college level with the publication of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s influential book, “On Death and Dying,” in 1969. But it is rare that the subject is discussed at the high school level, particularly with an approach that includes fairly explicit instruction in caring for a cadaver.

Yeshiva High School
Yeshiva High School sent 77 senior students to the funeral home as part of a course teaching Judaic practices and traditions surrounding death, dying and grief.

 

“As a senior, you’re thinking about going to college, and as a teenager you have this feeling of invincibility,” Daniel Feldan, 17, said the morning after the visit to the funeral home on Tuesday. “I’ve never had that other feeling — of mortality, that life might end soon.”

Bailey Frohlich, also 17, nodded at hearing her classmate’s words. “It’s given us a reality check,” she said. “For us, it’s usually about college and friends and extracurriculars. You don’t focus on the grittier things. But even if you don’t have a personal connection to death, thank God, it affects the whole community.”

The 10-hour, eight-session course, titled “The Final Journey: How JudaismDignifies the Final Passage,” aims for sensitivity even as it provokes a certain degree of shock. Besides going to the funeral home, where they received detailed explanations of washing and dressing a corpse, the students have classroom lessons on topics including the history of the Jewish burial societies known as chevra kadisha, the Talmudic foundations of end-of-life practices, and issues involving autopsy and organ donation.

“When we started the program, there was a lot of hesitation and curiosity at the same time,” said Rabbi Jonathan Kroll, 45, the yeshiva’s head of school. “Jewish tradition for dealing with burial and the process of tahara is not that well known. Even for a lot of well-educated Jews, the chevra kadisha is like a secret society. But once you start talking about the values involved or the practical aspects, there’s a fascination.”

The program at Yeshiva High School began with Rochel U. Berman, a 79-year-old author and a former nursing home worker who moved near the school 13 years ago. Her well-regarded book on Jewish burial rituals, “Dignity Beyond Death,” was published in 2005. Over the years she lived in South Florida and the New York metropolitan area, and she served as a chevra kadisha volunteer in both places, preparing the bodies of about 1,000 women and girls, from centenarians who simply wore out to an 18-month-old baby felled by cancer.

In broad ways, Jewish rituals around death and dying trace back to antiquity, and they have been central to Jewish continuity in the diaspora. The system of chevra kadisha emerged in Central Europe in the 16th century. Initially almost a social institution composed of the elite, chevra kadisha groups transformed over the centuries into an example of communal or congregational voluntarism.

An unlikely adopter of religious tradition, Ms. Berman grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as the child of secular socialists. Her Jewish language, rather than the Hebrew of worship and Zionism, was the Yiddish of the Old World shtetl and the New World slum.

By the time Ms. Berman’s father died in 1985, she had grown observant. Even so, between the final kiss she planted on his forehead in his deathbed and the lowering of the coffin into the ground the next day, she had no idea what had been done with her father’s body.

Jewish funeral process
From left: Sarina Solomon, Ariella Mamann and Jolie Davies, students at Yeshiva High School, practiced the Jewish funeral process that would be used to cleanse a body before burial.

 

“I didn’t know what I was missing, but I knew there was a hole there,” she recalled. “And the not-knowing made me even sadder.”

While living in New York, she and her husband, George Berman, both started volunteering in their Orthodox synagogue’s chevra kadisha, which has separate units for each gender. The processes of washing and purifying the body, of dressing it in a white linen shroud, of moving it into a plain wooden coffin filled her with a sense of communal purpose.

Not content with her own years as a volunteer or with her book, Ms. Berman resolved to reach young people as a way of imbuing the next generation with those Judaic values. “It’s a gift to give them, a part of the Jewish life cycle they didn’t know about,” she said. “And once they know it, they’ll be the ambassadors in sharing it.”

Rabbi Kroll assumed the leadership of Yeshiva High School in Boca Raton, Fla., three years ago. Coincidentally, it turned out that he, somewhat later than Ms. Berman, had belonged to the same synagogue and volunteered in the same chevra kadisha in New York’s Westchester County.

With $21,000 in grants from foundations and religious organizations, Ms. Berman devised a curriculum. Rabbi Kroll tested it last year with half of the seniors in the class of 2015.

“We had pushback,” he recalled, “but it wasn’t serious pushback. Several parents questioned the priority: ‘Why not use the time on something more pertinent, more relevant?’ My impression is that the pushback was about their own discomfort with mortality.”

As for the first batch of students, half of them reported on evaluation forms that, as a result of the course, they would consider being in a chevra kadisha. That response was more than sufficient for Rabbi Kroll to expand the program to this year’s entire senior class. Among the 78 students, he said, only three have had an immediate family member die. (One of those three was excused from the funeral home trip.)

Even those like Maya Borzak, 18, whose grandfather served in a chevra kadisha, found there was plenty to learn. In fact, the funeral home visit occurred just five days before the unveiling of that grandfather’s headstone, which in Jewish tradition takes place after a year of mourning.

“I always knew that, in general, it’s important to have a Jewish identity, that you’re born a Jew and you need to die a Jew,” Maya said. “You have a circumcision if you’re a boy, you have baby-naming if you’re a girl, and then, at the end, everyone is buried in the same way.”

“Now I know more than the sources for the processes and rituals,” she said. “I know the dignity that is supposed to be provided for everyone who dies. It’s the great equalizer. We’re all in this together.”

Complete Article HERE!