Counting to Ten

This morning I went to a different minyan than usual because it was a friend's last day in NY, and I promised I'd show up at the shul he usually goes to for minyan, even though they were starting forty minutes earlier than the place I usually go, and was ten minutes farther away. When I arrived, I was only the sixth person in the room, and because it's a Modern Orthodox synagogue, I didn't count towards the minyan anyway.

It took another twenty minutes before we finally had ten men, and though we did move forward in the davening while we waited, I spent those twenty minutes paralyzed with fear that we wouldn't have a minyan, I wouldn't be able to say kaddish, and I'd have to try to run to another minyan once we finished.

I hadn't thought about this much up until this point, but one of the things that I like about saying Kaddish is the way it forces you to depend on your community. You have this obligation, and in order to fulfill it you have to get nine other people to help you out, and fulfill an obligation of their own.

Sometimes grieving feels so private that it can seem bizarre to have to say Kaddish in front of a group of people. But having those people around forces you into a community, forces you to care about other people when you might otherwise be consumed with a more selfish and all-encompassing grief. It's not fun, really. Waiting for a minyan can actually be quite stressful, but I think it gives a new perspective in a time when it's easy to be too inwardly focused.

Mourning and the Right to Lead Davening

Some of the rules of being a mourner seem obvious to me. I understand why I'm prohibited from going to see a live music or theater performance, and I appreciate that restriction. It makes sense to hold back from such public displays of jubilation and drama when I'm still, internally, an emotion basket case. It also seems like a sign of respect to

But when I first heard that mourners had a greater hiyuv, or obligation, to daven, than other people attending a minyan, and were thus the preferred choice for leading services, I was surprised. It's one thing to require that we show up every day and praise God despite the raw grief we're feeling, but it's another thing entirely to say that we should lead others in long expressions of thanks every morning, afternoon and night. That seems almost perverse. Of course I can go through the motions, but should I--or any mourner--really be leading davening when they're likely having a crisis of faith, or at the very least struggling with loss and acceptance?

That's what I used to think, but I've changed my mind.

Some days I feel like I am in a constant one-sided conversation with God. That whole bargaining stage of grieving? It's for real, people. So it makes sense that I'd be the person to lead the plea for his goodwill. But also, and perhaps more importantly, when you're a shaliach tzibur, you have to pay close attention to what's going on. You have to be more present in the moment than if you're just answering Amen to someone reciting a blessing at the front of the room. Grieving can feel like being very far away from the world, and from everything that's happening in it. Standing at the amud calling out words of joy and gratitude to God--it requires you to focus yourself, and it focuses others on your words. You can't be far away.

I didn't think I would feel this way, but especially in the past couple of weeks I've been itching to lead davening. I have a few things to say to God. I can't wait to stand at the Amud.

Getting Back to the Routine

Now that Simchat Torah is over the Jewish holiday season finally comes to a close. After a month on the job, I’ll have my first whole week at work starting on Monday. Soon I will be getting up at basically the same time every morning, going to work, going to the gym, coming home, and seeing my friends. I have been looking forward to this for months, but it’s also terrifying, and incredibly sad.

I’ve always been the kind of person who flourishes when given some kind of routine, even if it’s a very loose one. Last year I was immersed in a schedule of teaching, taking classes and writing. Every morning I davened, wrote for the website where I worked, took a yoga class, and spent some time on my thesis. And then when Eema got really sick, in March, everything shifted. I returned to Chicago to spend my time with Eema. I stopped going to yoga, and stopped davening every morning. My work at Jewcy became spotty, and my thesis was moved to the bottom of my list of priorities. For the next several months, my days were unpredictable and chaotic. There were appointments with doctors, visits with friends and guests from out of town, bathing, shopping, reading, and massaging. Most days were a hodgepodge of activities depending mostly on how Eema was feeling. I was so happy to be able to help Eema, to be with her, but I felt miserable and unmoored by my lack of routine. I clung to the few constants—coffee with Laura in the mornings, time at the gym, and working—but mainly I coached myself that sometime soon I would have a routine again.

After Eema died there was a week of strict routine in shiva, but then everything shifted and opened up again. I thought moving to New York would finally give me the anchoring that I craved, but as soon as I got here the holidays took over, and I bounced from work to holiday to Shabbat, as anxious as ever. Now that stage is finally, mercifully, coming to an end.

But I don’t feel happy, or even relieved. Part of grieving, I’ve noticed, is getting to the next stage where things should be easier, and realizing that it’s farther away from the person you miss. Of course, I’m thrilled to have reached the point where I can really get into the groove of my routine. But I’m also horrified that my mother has been dead for a month and a half. How did this happen? I want to freeze the world at this point. I want to stay as close to her as I can (though really, if I’m making time travel wishes, I’d rather go back a year and a half and do a whole lot of things differently, and not stay here in the year of suckiness).

I appreciate that saying kaddish is one element of this year that is a constant, a helpful daily piece of routine. But as the days go by I can’t help thinking that maybe I don’t want a routine as much as I thought I did.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

I’ve always been a very vivid dreamer, and it’s actually one of the things that I shared with Eema. We both would have long strange elaborate dreams involving all kinds of strange people, and we liked to talk about them, to tell them as stories. Yes, I’m aware that many people consider listening to other people’s dreams to be horribly boring, but Eema and I never cared.

Because of my tendency to remember my dreams I was hoping that I might have one about Eema. I don’t really believe in that stuff—that dead people can visit us in our dreams, or whatever—but I wanted it anyway. I have been having lots of dreams lately, but Eema wasn’t in any of them. And then a few days ago I dreamt that I was having a conversation with Abba and Deena, and we were talking about Renana needing to be picked up from somewhere and taken somewhere else. We were discussing who could pick her up, and I asked, “Well what is Eema doing?” And then I realized, and then the dream was over. It was—unsettling. Embarrassing. How could I not remember, even in a dream, this huge and horrible thing?

The day after I had that dream was Friday, and after work in the afternoon I was back at the apartment cooking and cleaning and getting ready for Shabbat. I spoke with Renana just before candle lighting and she said something that suddenly made me realize I hadn’t been thinking about Eema at all for a while. I can’t say how long, really, but it seems like it could have been hours since I had last thought about her, and about my own sadness, and I was simultaneously shocked, appalled and impressed by myself. How had I managed to do that? Would I just continue to do it, and that’s what it means to move on? I hope not, because it wasn’t a particularly healing experience. I didn’t feel any better, I just hadn’t felt horrible for a little while. It feels like a sin of omission.

I’ve always thought that recovering from a broken heart is that dealing with a really nasty fall. For a while you cannot go anywhere or do anything without being reminded of the pain, and how different you are from everyone else who’s able to just go on with their lives normally while you hobble around feeling like shit. And then you get better at hobbling, and maybe stronger, but mostly probably just used to it and you still feel crappy. And even though it’s nice not to be doing quite as poorly as before you still wish you were getting the pity you got when things were at their worst. But slowly things get better and better, and then there’s a long stage where there’s a visible bruise, and you keep touching it to see if it still hurts. And for a while it does, and then suddenly it doesn’t. And eventually the bruise goes away.

I don’t think grief works entirely the same way. There are similarities, but I think that when you have your heart broken in a romantic sense, you can console yourself with the knowledge that there are other fish in the sea, and you are likely to fall in love again. I feel like most people suffer from broken hearts and recover and go on to love other people. But when your mother dies, it just doesn’t work that way. There is no other mother that’s going to come along. And I guess partially because of the permanence of the loss, and the way it can never be smoothed over by some other character playing a similar part, I was just so surprised and disappointed in myself.

Friday night I had a dream about Eema. She and I were sitting on a couch somewhere looking at old pictures of her, and she was sick, but she was well in the pictures, and we talked about them and she gave me a hug and I cried into her shoulder. When I woke up, I kept my eyes squeezed shut and stayed in bed for another hour, hoping I could make it come back.

The hope for coming back—it’s so complicated and strange. There’s a whole facet of Judaism focused on what will happen when the dead are revived, if they’re revived, and what various Jewish texts seem to say about reincarnation and revivification. When I was home in Chicago last week I spoke about it with Abba and Deena and felt as confused about it as ever.

It’s not something that I ever spent much time thinking about before. I thought it was kind of wrong to think about it, because if you just banked on being brought back to life after death then what was the point of getting anything done in this world? And I still feel that way, but I also feel strongly that there’s no way to escape wanting someone to come back when they die. And it isn’t really an abstract kind of wanting, it’s a specific, direct and sharp desire for something that seems like it should be attainable. Someone was here a month ago, a week ago, yesterday—how can it be that they are no longer capable of coming back?

Dreams seem like a middle ground. They’re not real. They’re created by our brains trying to process the mental work of our days. But their perceived realness makes a dreamt reincarnation less threatening theologically, and very comforting psychologically.

And with that—bedtime.

Not There Yet

I’ve always been a person who stands during the mourner’s kaddish. My father always stands, so I always have, too. I actually stand for any kaddish, which means that I hear ‘yitgadal’ and automatically get to my feet. Maybe it’s because there are so many permutations of the kaddish in every service, but for some reason I’m still sometimes surprised when we get to the mourner’s kaddish. Occasionally I miss the first few words because I’ve been zoning out, or I wasn’t done reading whatever came just before it, or I was waiting for someone to say, “Mourner’s Kaddish, page 81.” In any event, it sometimes takes me a few seconds to catch up to the other people saying the Kaddish, and it’s unnerving and embarrassing when this happens.

I am not used to being a mourner yet. It has been over a month, but I’m really not accustomed to this new frame of mind.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the placement of the mourner’s kaddish, the way it comes at the very end of davening, as a final period to the whole service. Logistically that makes a lot of sense to me. Mourners can show up pretty late to davening and still fulfill their obligation. But more often than not it seems like the kaddish is something we’re trying to get through so we can be done already. People are packing up their tallitot, and whispering, and as soon as kaddish is over there are the inevitable and boring announcements. Somehow the kaddish has been unmoored from the rest of davening, and I find that disconcerting. Of course, it does feel isolated to be a mourner, but isn’t the whole point of the kaddish that even mourners still believe in God, that they have to continue to proclaim their faith and their steadfastness in the community even when it feels a little disingenuous?

There is, of course, a kaddish much earlier in the service, and I like that one better, though I don’t always make it to shul in time to say it. I think sometimes I’m more ready to say the words early on in the service. By the time I’ve gotten to the end of davening I’m worn down by the whole thing, the hugeness of my faith staring at me as I try to say words I have trouble believing. And the members of the minyan are beginning to shift their focus to whatever comes next in their day. But that first kaddish is easier. It’s like a gulp of fresh air taken before a sprint. Frightening, but instinctual. I’m always ready for the kaddish in the middle of services, and I never feel ready for the one that comes at the end. I wonder if I ever will.

Pink Ribbon Frustrations

I’ve been reading a lot of letters lately. I save all of the letters I get, and even have them fairly organized, so I was recently able to look through all of the letters that my mother gave me, from my fifteenth birthday card, to a note that seems to be the result of a disagreement we had last summer. Inevitably, upon reading the letters, I cry. One letter in particular she sent to me in Nashville shortly after her mastectomy last October. She thanked me to helping her during the recovery process, and wrote how confident she was that she would get through her illness “with flying colors.”

Reading the letter last night got me thinking about how this is breast cancer awareness month, and so every other product that’s for sale, from Cheerios to body wash to sandals, is available with a pink ribbon on it during the month of October, and everyone seems to be raising money for breast cancer charities. It’s a great cause, but I also find it to be a little frustrating and sad. The ad campaigns always focus on survivors, and there are pictures of women walking scores of miles, leaping for joy, proudly baring their bald heads. It’s nice, but it’s also so far separated from how my family experienced breast cancer, that I find myself recoiling from the pink ribbon as often as I embrace it. Breast cancer was not exercise and joy and pride for us, it was gruesome and slow and horrifically cruel. Buying a pink bottle of shampoo might technically support breast cancer research, but it seems a little…inappropriate?

And then, too, there are the incredibly thoughtless things people say about cancer. I’ve heard survivors telling others that they had to survive, they were fighters, they were determined to beat this thing! Well that’s good, but what does that say about my mother? She wasn’t a fighter? She wasn’t determined enough? And is the logic there that if someone isn’t fighting with great determination, if someone loses hope at some point for some reason, then that person deserves to die?

There's a narrative that we all have in our heads about certain types of cancer, and probably breast cancer most of all. I think the pink ribbon has been instrumental in making breast cancer out to be this rough but ultimately okay patch in most people's lives, and I feel a little cheated and misled by that. Rough and misleading is doesn't even cover what we were feeling on the best days.

Jews Bring Too Much Food? Waste During Shiva

(Cross posted on The Jew and the Carrot)

A few months ago I wrote some tips on appropriate and helpful ways to bring food to someone who’s ill or grieving. At the time, my mother was in treatment for terminal cancer, and though we were grateful to have an amazing community providing food for us during such a difficult time, I often found myself guiltily throwing out some leftovers that had gotten shoved to the back of the fridge to make room for new offerings. I suggested that people try to bring smaller portions.

Then, on September 9th, my mother passed away, and what had been a slight excess of food transformed into a mountain of baked goods, stacks of trays from kosher restaurants, and Tupperware as far as the eye could see. From the very first day of shiva we were completely overwhelmed with food, and the same women who were coordinating people to bring us meals were having to sort through the fridge and toss or freeze the obscene amount of casseroles, cakes and random snacks that people were bringing when they came to visit with us.

One of the rules of sitting shiva is that the mourners should not prepare their own food, so we had expected to have meals for the week made and prepared by others, but we were not prepared for the sheer quantity of what we ended up with. Among other things, we ended the week with an ant problem in our kitchen because there was so much food sitting out all the time.

Over all, I found shiva to be a difficult but incredibly healing week, and it was wonderful to have so many people showing us their support in so many ways. Still, it frustrates me to see so much food go to waste, and some of the craziness that resulted from having other people run my kitchen for a week was no fun at all. So, here’s some new tips and thoughts on bringing food to a shiva house.

Call ahead
Typically meals are arranged for a family sitting shiva, so if you want to contribute, it’s best to find out who’s coordinating the meals, and ask when you could sign up to bring something instead of just showing up with something at random. Unplanned dishes are the ones that tend to end up in the compost heap first.

Plan (farther) ahead
It was a pretty huge shock to go from having so much food we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, to being all on our own as soon as shiva was over. No one really did this, but it would have been so nice to have someone offer to bring us a meal a week after shiva ended, or even two weeks later.

Be aware of kitchen etiquette
If you’re going to be bringing food or helping out at a shiva house, try to be respectful of the kitchen you’re dealing with, and if you don’t know, please ask. At one point during the week my sister walked into our kitchen to find that someone had taken a sharpie to our Dairy drainer and carefully labeled it ‘MEAT.’ A few days later I noticed that the bin we usually use to store potatoes contained a 9x13 pan, some measuring cups, some silverware, a paring knife, and a sauce pan. Though we only left the house once the entire week, no one who was involved in dealing with the kitchen ever came to us to ask where something belonged, or if something was meat or dairy. When the shiva was over, the amount of reorganizing we had to do was really epic.

Consider a healthy treat
If you really want to bring something unsolicited, consider something homemade and healthy. By far the majority of the food that we received was some variety of baked goods. Now don’t get me wrong, I love cake, and I love bagels, but at a certain point it was just out of control, and in the end, many cakes were tossed half-eaten. Some people opted to bring more unusual and healthier offerings, and those tended to get gobbled up because we were feeling a little overwhelmed by how much sugar we were all consuming. When a friend brought over homemade guacamole before Shabbat, it went quickly. We loved the fancy cappuccino torte and the vegan mango cheesecake was delicious, but every once in a while I just wanted a carrot.

Share a food memory
If someone from the family indicates that they want to talk, consider sharing a food-related memory. I know how uncomfortable people get at shiva houses. It is sad, and can be awkward to try to express sympathy without resorting to clichés. But food can be a great vehicle to beginning a conversation about the deceased. I was so touched by the number of people who mentioned wonderful Shabbat and holiday meals they had with my mother. People told us about being new in town, and how my mother invited them to eat with our family. They remembered specific dishes she was famous for, and told us about times she brought food to them when they needed support. Those conversations were incredibly meaningful and always so nice to hear; a great improvement over “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

You're Not That Special

During the week of sitting shiva, it feels a little like being the star of some kind of bizarre show. There's an audience hanging around all the time watching you, and everyone has lines that they say to you and lines they expect you to say in return. It feels, in a strange way, like being very important. And then the week ends, and suddenly the show has been canceled. There are people who still check in on you, and ask anxiously how you're doing every time they see you, but for the most part, the world around you shifts on to whatever comes next.

One of the few things that I actually like about saying Kaddish is that it asks the world (well, the minyan at least) to focus back in on the mourner, to allow us to be important again for just a few scattered minutes every day. But even then, it's all of the mourners collectively who get the attention, not one person specifically. I partially resent this--I guess I feel strongly that my grief is greater than anyone else's and I just want people to know that I'm feeling crappy--but I also appreciate that it makes me notice that there are other people going through similarly crappy times. There's this moment that I've noticed in most minyanim when the people who are saying Kaddish surreptitously look around to see who else is saying it, too. I've never approached anyone after Kaddish to ask their story--"So, who died?"--but there's a delicate thread of kinship that's built in that first moment of 'Yitgadal.'