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Jan. 17th, 2010 10:59 pmThe sea breeze is keeping me awake. This is just as well. It's been a very long day and I have much I have to sort through.
The sequential ceremonies were beautiful. The rain started just after the second (for my stepfather's sister-in-law) and I held an umbrella over Mum as the rain poured down.
That rain, the umbrella and all Les's family and friends beyond it coalesced something important in my mind. I had been looking over everyone, friends, relatives and their friends and relatives and I was thinking about the network that knits itself together for mourning.
When Jewish mourning works properly, it knits itself together from the moment the Chevra Kadisha sends someone to sit with the body. It builds and redoubles its itself every week for the first month of mourning. It's pretty stable then until the eleventh month. The consecration of the grave is where (in my Orthodox Australian experience) everyone comes together one last time, reinforces the support, gives a hug and a farewell and a long life* or two and normal life begins again.
The faces from the mourning are often those that we see over and over in normal life. My first father's two best friends were there for Les's consecration as they had been for Dad's 21 years before. Les's German lecturer and his wife were there, braving their own illnesses to farewell not just Les, but the part of the network and friendships he held together by his very existence. All sorts of people turned up to see his grave consecrated, from all sorts of parts of his life. Not everyone was Jewish. Everyone loved him and misses him.
I guess we have all got this network. We don't always see it. We don't know its nature. Only those who mourn us in the old-fashioned way have an inkling. It's there, though. No mater how things go wrong in everyday life, there are people in our lives who will miss us enough to allow themselves to be knitted into a temporary fabric after we die.
The perfect mourning for me, when I die, would be my friends and family meeting and where they suit, making friends in their turn. Death shouldn't be an ending, but a beginning. Both my fathers have taught me that. I hope that there are gatherings when I die. They don't have to be Orthodox Jewish in nature, but it would be nice if my networks shone for a moment as Les's did today and people saw each other and remembered their own part in my life.
We did that for Les. It was a perfect farewell. Perfect farewells are rare and this one I shall treasure all my life.
*'long life' is the traditional thing one says to mourners
The sequential ceremonies were beautiful. The rain started just after the second (for my stepfather's sister-in-law) and I held an umbrella over Mum as the rain poured down.
That rain, the umbrella and all Les's family and friends beyond it coalesced something important in my mind. I had been looking over everyone, friends, relatives and their friends and relatives and I was thinking about the network that knits itself together for mourning.
When Jewish mourning works properly, it knits itself together from the moment the Chevra Kadisha sends someone to sit with the body. It builds and redoubles its itself every week for the first month of mourning. It's pretty stable then until the eleventh month. The consecration of the grave is where (in my Orthodox Australian experience) everyone comes together one last time, reinforces the support, gives a hug and a farewell and a long life* or two and normal life begins again.
The faces from the mourning are often those that we see over and over in normal life. My first father's two best friends were there for Les's consecration as they had been for Dad's 21 years before. Les's German lecturer and his wife were there, braving their own illnesses to farewell not just Les, but the part of the network and friendships he held together by his very existence. All sorts of people turned up to see his grave consecrated, from all sorts of parts of his life. Not everyone was Jewish. Everyone loved him and misses him.
I guess we have all got this network. We don't always see it. We don't know its nature. Only those who mourn us in the old-fashioned way have an inkling. It's there, though. No mater how things go wrong in everyday life, there are people in our lives who will miss us enough to allow themselves to be knitted into a temporary fabric after we die.
The perfect mourning for me, when I die, would be my friends and family meeting and where they suit, making friends in their turn. Death shouldn't be an ending, but a beginning. Both my fathers have taught me that. I hope that there are gatherings when I die. They don't have to be Orthodox Jewish in nature, but it would be nice if my networks shone for a moment as Les's did today and people saw each other and remembered their own part in my life.
We did that for Les. It was a perfect farewell. Perfect farewells are rare and this one I shall treasure all my life.
*'long life' is the traditional thing one says to mourners