Death is an everyday tragedy. Especially at the moment. It is rare to meet someone who has made it to adulthood without having lost someone fairly close. When I say “adulthood”, I mean, say, 30, rather than 18: able to hold down a job, sustain a relationship, disagree with someone without hurling crockery, make chicken soup from scratch — Jewish adulthood then... though the only one I could say I manage with any confidence in my 50s is the soup bit. By the age of 30, I had lost my step-dad, my great-aunt, my last two remaining grandparents and my father.
Years ago, I worked with a woman who was in her early 30s and had never been bereaved. There was something oddly Teflon-y about her, untouched, as if life as well as death had not yet left its fingerprints on her face or her mind. Bereavement makes us grow up, whether we like it or not. Our sense of loss is at the heart of what it means to be human, our consciousness of what loss is, and our need to find ways to make it bearable, so that we can carry on. Our Judaism offers a framework to hold us, to contain the shocking rawness of grief in a comforting, familiar vessel.
There is to be an online Zoom shiva for a close friend’s father-in-law, Henry Ebner. Although I met him only a couple of times, at his grandchildren’s bat- and barmitzvahs, I am of course here, via my laptop, for those who mourn, primarily his son and his wife, my friend. This is a Jewish tradition that I think should be adopted more widely — the idea that it is important to attend a funeral or shiva to support the mourners, regardless of whether or not you knew the deceased.
Although I have joined in online services for Friday night, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur etc and had the occasional Zoom meeting, I am not sure what to expect from a Zoom shiva. Surely it won’t be the same as the real thing? Might it feel sterile?
But no. Seeing all these faces on my laptop — multiple households, each contained in a small rectangle on the screen — makes me aware of the very particular nature of bereavement. The experience of loss is an intensely personal one, unique and distinct for each of us, yet also collective and unifying. Perhaps it is this, more than any other single thing, that binds us together — the core knowledge that our time on the planet is finite and it is this that makes us value life so highly?
The tributes are moving and sketch in facets of a clearly remarkable, much-loved man I was not lucky enough to know for himself; what he was like as a colleague, a friend and a grandpa.
We reach the point in the service where the rabbi asks if we will join him in reciting Psalm 23. I open my book and begin:
“God is my shepherd, I shall not want. In green fields God lets me lie…”
That’s as far as I get. I am choked up and can no longer speak. I do not make it as far as “...leading me by quiet streams,/restoring my soul...”
Why does it touch me so deeply? As ever, at a funeral, I am moved by bearing witness to the feelings of those who mourn but in this instance, I think it is not that.
Is it because, inevitably, any kind of memorial calls to mind the loss of those closest to me — my parents? Fragments of each of their funerals flit into my head: the rabbi in wellies at my father’s funeral (the ground was deep in snow but a welly-wearing rabbi was a touch my dad would have relished). The moment when my mother’s woven basket coffin arrived at the civic graveyard — and I thought, “Oh, Mum would love that coffin — it’s so very her,” and then — like driving into a brick wall — slam! — “but she’s in it”. Telling myself, it’s not her any more, really not, it’s just the shell of her, just the body.
For me, the psalm encapsulates all that makes me most sad about belief: my deep yearning for spiritual meaning and succour, especially in dark times and times of grief — pulling so unforgivingly against my own stubborn lack of faith.
That is what I want: a shepherd to lead me by quiet streams, to restore my soul, to guide me in paths of truth.
And that is why, even for people like me — bereft of belief, of faith, of God — still I need the formality, the structure, the holding of a service at a time of loss, and so when, at the end, the rabbi says: “May the ever-present God be a source of comfort to you together with all those who mourn...” I do indeed feel comforted, as well as profoundly moved.
And if you have borne a loss these past few months, while we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, whether without fear if you are made of sterner stuff or trembling like me, I wish you long life, the cherishing of precious memories, and comfort wherever you may find it.
In memoriam: Henry Ebner – 1937–2020
Claire Calman’s fifth novel, Growing Up for Beginners, is out now.
