When I was 22, I walked into temple for the first time for something other than one of my cousin’s bar mitzvahs. It was Kol Nidre and I found the service foreign and daunting and wildly compelling. I was, at the time, what my husband would call a “deli Jew,” culturally aware and religiously ignorant. But I wanted to know more, I wanted to be one of those Jews who knew the melodies and the prayers, who felt comfortable in a community on the most important holiday of the Jewish calendar. Year after year of attending services and I still want the same thing, though I grow closer to feeling at home in my own religion with every rotation of the annual cycle. Yom Kippur is known as the day of atonement, a day of fasting and self-reflection. Its also a day very much about death. And while I didn’t have much exposure to Judaism in my youth, I was exposed to death in 1981 when my father died. The irony that I became more Jewish in response to the death of my very atheistic father is not lost on me and not without a modicum of guilt. But its true. My YK drash is usually about a particular prayer or portion of the liturgy. But this year, I’m focused on a bigger picture. And what better way to enter the exploration than with a quote from the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:
“Yom Kippur – when we do not eat or drink or engage in physical pleasure, and when there is a custom to wear a kittel like a shroud – is a dress rehearsal for death. It forces us to ask the ultimate question: what did I do in my life that was worthwhile? Did I waste time or did I share it, with my faith, with God, and with those in need?”
On Yom Kippur we spend 25 hours engaged in this dress rehearsal. We abstain from eating, drinking and showering. We dress in the white that represents the shroud in which we will be buried. In silent meditation and in communal atonement, we acknowledge that death is coming - today, tomorrow, sometime in the future, inevitably, painfully, sweetly, silently, it comes for us all. So if that’s true - if we can all acknowledge that we live with the inarguable truth that ‘who by fire’ is an inalienable fact of life, how do we face it with more dignity, more bravery and maybe even more willingness to embrace its inevitability? We. All. Die. It is as true as the statement that we were all born. Yet we spend significantly less time acknowledging or affirming that truth. We know that we die as we were born - inelegantly, naked and afraid. But we don’t know how or when.
A few weeks ago, Matti and I and two dear friends were out to dinner when suddenly, one of them stood and gasped, hands over her mouth in shock. Across the street, a dog had been hit by a car. She saw it happen. It took me a moment to register. But next thing I knew I was cradling this dog, petting him as he lay in a liminal state, caught between life and death. I don’t remember crossing the street or even getting down on the ground. But there I was, in the middle of Sunset Boulevard, stroking the silky, noble head of this sweet dog and telling him he was a good boy. Matti was all action - taking the dog’s collar so he could try to reach the owner. “Rowland” was the name on the tag. Two strangers and I moved the dog onto a blanket and into the car of good samaritans who transported the dog to the nearest emergency vet. As they drove off, I walked back across the street, washed the blood off my hands in the restroom and hugged my friends goodbye, eager to return home. We were snuggling our own pups when the text came through from the owner telling us that Rowland didn’t make it and thanking us for taking care of him in his final moments.
“I think I should be a death doula,” I said to Matti the next day. “Because you’re obsessed with death?” he asked. “I’m not obsessed with death,” I replied. And that’s true. Nor was I traumatized by the death of that dog. I was sad for the dog, upset for the owner and angry at the hit and run driver who was never caught. But I was also grateful - grateful for the opportunity to be with that animal - to pet him and keep him calm. I was sad for the owner that his dog died - but also sad that he wasn’t the one to hold him in his last moments. Its not death I’m obsessed with as much as the process of dying, and of grieving. Death and its consequences are an undeniable part of the life cycle, but one we spend too little time thinking about, much less discussing. In his book, Being Mortal, Dr. Atul Gawande talks about how as a culture, we have become more and more removed from death - death has been medicalized and institutionalized. We pawn death and dying off to professionals - professionals who are strangers. We do this in the guise of doing the best for our loved ones. But we are also trying to do the best for our own fears - as if to remove ourselves from death’s proximity will somehow stave it off.
My father’s death at the age of 48 was a sudden blow, a shock to my 14 year old system. I didn’t see him get sick, there was no ramp up, no rehearsal, no “cat’s on the roof.” He was alive and vibrant. And then he was dead. So the idea of holding someone as they die, of being able to kiss them on the forehead, say goodbye, help them through their pain, seems to me an extraordinary gift. To help a soul transition, to be present, to witness and maybe try to ease the transition from this life to whatever comes next - what a privilege.
As a 14 year old kid, if asked I would say, “I don’t believe in God.” I said that because my father didn’t believe in God. And I loved my father. His death was a great tragedy in my life. It was also, in many ways, a great opportunity. Because without his very powerful presence and great certainty, I had to figure shit out on my own - and ponder things like “do I really not believe in God?” “If I don’t believe in God, why am I so drawn to Judaism? Why do I like talking to rabbis?” “And why do I care so much about Yom Kippur?” I think my father called himself an atheist because he didn’t have the words for what he really was: an ethical humanist maybe, a naturalist perhaps. Always a Jew - God or no God - my father would defend his identity as a Jew and fight against anti-semitism no matter what. My father defied definition. And I adored him.
My father made only one grave mistake in his life, as far as I’m concerned. And the mistake of his life was about his death. As much as his death was a shock to us kids, it was clearly something he had thought about and discussed with my mother because she had very strict instructions: no funeral, no memorial, no burial. He requested a simple cremation and that his ashes be spread in the Sierras by his family. And that’s what was done. One moment, I’m standing in my childhood kitchen when my mother answers the phone and received the news my father is dead. A few weeks later, we hiked up a trail in the Desolation Wilderness to scatter his ashes. I never saw his body, never had a reckoning with the idea that the vibrant, energetic man that was my father, was no more.
My mother, an agnostic herself who left any formal Judaism behind the day she married, was only 46 when my dad died. She had three kids and no idea how to be on her own - she’d gone from her parents’ home to the one she shared with my father. Her grief was all consuming and manifested as alternating depression and anxiety. She did the best she could, but it never occurred to her that we were grieving too. Or at least that’s what it felt like. She’d lost her husband, her first great love and the father of her children. We had lost our dad. With no one to guide me and no religious education or community to support me, my grief took on a decade long cycle of depression, loneliness and bad behavior.
So in many ways, its the most obvious thing in the world that I would be compelled as an adult to dive into an exploration of death and grief in Judaism and that I would embrace Judaism’s strict guidelines for the end of the life cycle as being not just crucial but incredibly kind. Death is not what scares me. Grief is what scares me. Grief with no boundaries - mourning without process - these are things that no child should have to encounter and no adult should have to endure. As Jews, we have strict rules around death - how we are to prepare the body, how quickly it must be buried and that the burial is done by our own hands, not left to strangers. I take seriously the obligation to wrap my hands around the crude wood of the shovel to scoop dirt into the gravesite of my grandfather, old friend, father-in-law, mother-in-law of my best friend. There’s a term for this in Judaism: Chesed Shel Emet - compassionate concern and kindness of the living for the deceased. To me, Chesed Shel Emet is a great honor, one I did not have the privilege of bestowing on my own father.
Our tradition tells us that just as the burial ends, so does our cycle of grief begin. We are commanded to grieve on a schedule and in stages: directly following burial is seven days of shiva, thirty days of shloshim and, for children mourning a parent, a year that ends with the setting of the headstone. The schedule dictates that none of these things is done in isolation. Shiva is with our community - a community encouraged to not deflect conversation away from the deceased but rather to talk about the dead and celebrate the dead in order to not forget. Kaddish is with our community. Our community is there to lift us up when our knees are too weak to support the weight of our pain.
Just as we have the schedule of mourning, so too are we commanded to STOP mourning - after thirty days for a loved one, a year for a parent - and to return to our routines, to stop our period of mourning and to LIVE. And, our tradition also allows that on very specific days of the year, we are to REMEMBER - remember our dead, say a prayer for our dead, honor our dead. Yom Kippur is one of those days - Kaddish coming at the height of our hunger when we’ve been on our feet and praying and entering the beginning of the last phase of the most intense day of prayer of the year. The traditionally packed synagogue yields to those in mourning, to those remembering a father, mother, son or daughter, husband, lover, friend. Left standing in front of the altar, stripped of our inhibition, unadorned of perfume or jewels, hungry and ground down to our very essence, our voices join in shared mourning - supporting one another - once again in community. And just like the cycle of mourning, when Kaddish is over the community comes back together to continue the prayers and rituals of Yom Kippur that take us to the 25th hour, to the very edges of our emotional and physical tolerance, to the highest of highs of our davening just before we have that one little bite of bread and sip of grape juice, so that we may begin the cycle of the year again.
So maybe I am a little obsessed with death - death as part of the life cycle and which I’m beginning to understand includes being there for the dying because one day that will be someone I love dearly - and one day that will be me. I will always believe that grief and the life cycle can never be discussed enough, felt enough or be enough of the fabric of our existence. To live is to spend every day dying just a little - so how do we demystify and embrace that fact and the emotions around it in ways that become less taboo and less terrifying?
As we approach the end of these Days of Awe - the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when the gates to Heaven are open and we work to open our hearts, seek forgiveness and spend time in deep, introspective meditation - I think about what my interest in death means about my belief in God. I’m reminded of my father-in-law, who turned to my husband a few days before his death and said, “Say Kaddish for me and get the rabbi.” He hadn’t spoken for days before and he spoke almost no words again. An atheist in life, he requested a Jewish burial as he neared death. Did this mean he felt God’s presence in some way? Another friend told the story of her husband seeing an angel just days before he died. She is not particularly religious, but the way she told the story made clear she was comforted by the presence of that angel, as was he. Both my father-in-law and my friend’s husband were men who likely spent quite a lot of time wrestling with the question of God’s existence in life, but who found themselves close to God or thinking of God as they approached death.
I want to say I felt close to God as I held that dog in the street a few weeks ago. I’m not sure what I mean by that except to say that I felt overwhelmed by love and responsibility and privilege and gratitude all at once. I was reminded of being with my grandfather as he was close to death and of holding my Great Aunt’s tiny hand in mine as I sat on the edge of her hospital bed the week before she passed. Its a feeling being entirely present and connected to another soul. It is a feeling devoid of fear.
If we knew we could die with our hand held, our life honored by a loved one, or even by a stranger who cared enough to be present in the moment, to take account of the time spent here on this planet, would that make us less afraid? If we knew our death would not inevitably be pawned off to a stranger in a nursing home would that give us comfort? If we felt the inevitable degradation of sensory perception as part of the natural course of events, and if that decline were met with love and humor rather than shame and denial, would we feel differently, less alone on the path that leads to the end of the cycle of life - that thing we fear called death? We’re all living longer. And our longer lives simply give us more time to fear that which we all know is coming. But if we had the courage to face what is coming and say it out loud - say I’m dying, someday, maybe not for days, weeks, months or years, but when it is my time, these are the things that matter - would that ease our fear and temper the anxiety of those who love us most?
As much as Yom Kippur is sometimes referred to as a “dress rehearsal for death,” the truth is we don’t get a practice run. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote “If life is a pilgrimage, death is an arrival.” We die once. There are no do-overs. That doesn’t make me afraid but it does make me want to do it right - for myself and for others. So yes, maybe I am a little obsessed with death and maybe that does make me think more about God and my Judaism, maybe it does make me grateful for a tradition that understands that providing a framework for navigating the inevitable will never make it less sad or painful but can make it more tolerable. Maybe it even makes me think about becoming a death doula.
G’mar hatimah tovah and much love to all.
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