Seven days of shivah wasn’t enough

I found out how little I knew about the faith I was born into only when my Liverpudlian grandfather died at home in his own bed, and I was suddenly and frighteningly thrust into a world of Jewish grieving rituals and funeral arrangements.


It started off comically, with a nurse/friend asking me to call the hospital to tell them he had died, so that they would fetch the body. No longer Harry my Grandpa, my Zeida, but “the body”.

I rang the hospital and a man with a black bag arrived a few minutes later. I knew the Jews were fast about these things but this was ridiculous. I directed the man to the front bedroom at the top of the stairs, and he dashed up the stairs with a lot less sombreness than I expected, almost skipping. He came back down about a minute later and whispered to me, “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

“Course he is! That’s why you’re here!”

“No, I’m the chiropodist.” He was ashen faced, so I fetched my granddad’s barely touched whisky and the chiropodist and I swigged it neat from tea cups.

I had grown up in a decidedly lapsed Jewish household, my mother having more or less giving up on God when my father was killed, leaving her a young, bitter and frightened widow. Many years later, back in her home town, I was, I think, expected to know the routine… the calling of the rabbi, the renting of clothes, the covering of mirrors, the sitting of shivah, the VOLUMES of food brought over by relatives and friends.

But because my mother had found out about my father’s death in the same house, she was re-traumatised and a doctor came over and gave her, and anyone else who wanted it, Valium.

So my experience started off medicated, and then I started medicating for every death, and then life itself, and so death, Judaism and tranquilliser addiction wrongly became all joined up in my strangely wired brain… leading to eventual meltdown, a stint in rehab, and a memoir, Clean, ostensibly about getting clean (and also being a cleaning lady, which I was in early recovery from addiction) but really about a protracted and dysfunctional reaction to all death.

After getting hammered with the chiropodist, I had to figure out why the rabbi was going up and down the stairs with scissors, to “cut” the principle mourners.

My equally Judeo ignorant sister and I thought it was a blood-letting ritual, and hid in the bathroom until it was over and my mother, her sister and brother were all walking around wearing torn jumpers.

My mum had the foresight to change from a designer one to a schmatte. My sister was particularly put out by the covering of mirrors, lamenting in her broad New York-ese “So how’re we supposed to blow dry our hair for the funeral?”

Though we had both spent roughly equal amounts of time in New York and Liverpool, she was totally Queens, whereas I fell somewhere mid-Atlantic, neither here nor there, an ill-defined accent I maintain to this day.

But accents were the last thing on my mind. My sister and I spoke differently but we were both poorly lacking in any sort of Jewish education. We didn’t know how the Jews did life, let alone death. The small chairs in the front room foxed me, soon inhabited by a series of uncles in kippahs, playing what I thought was a distinctly uncomfortable version of musical chairs.

I dispatched myself to the galley kitchen, trying to find storage space for the masses of casseroles, cakes, rollmops and gefilte fish brought over by well-meaning friends and relatives who didn’t understand that their need to provide food was unmatched by the death-killed appetites of those in mourning.

The shivah room with its nursery naughty steps was fascinating to me. The men remained unshaven and looked progressively worse as the seven days of shivah wore on, looking weirdly closer to death themselves.

I didn’t go to the funeral, as I did not go to my father’s and I was not sure what fresh hell it might reveal. My father had been killed in a train accident in 1967. He was en route to Montreal, where his sister lived, before planning to join us in Liverpool. We found out the news slowly, by a series of telephone calls. There were only two people who were killed, on the packed train. How likely was it that he was one of them?

My Uncle Benny identified the body. My mother was too unwell and unstable to travel to Canada for the fast Jewish funeral. It didn’t seem like a big deal, not going. I was six. They hadn’t invented the concept of closure, back then.

But when my grandfather died, I did enjoy having some sort of purpose in the back kitchen, portioning, cling- filming trays and storing them in the slug-ridden shed in the paved over garden, and making endless cups of tea.

The Judaic rituals of death allowed me to connect with Judaism in a way which had eluded me until then, much more so then the Seders and barmitzvahs I had attended in my youth.

All I remember from that was constantly tapping my mother for 30 dollars for a posh pen (for the boy to become man) and going for eternal meals at the families of well-meaning, Jewish friends, these meals involving a certain amount of starvation before the actual meal, full of Hebrew prayers and a song that went Eli Eli oats e ay you… and then, more food than I could eat in a year. Starving and being stuffed. My lot clearly did not do things by halves. It was all or nothing. This did give me the notion, somehow, that it was OK to go crazy when people died. But only for seven days.

On the seventh day it was all over. The chairs went back into a van. The visitors trickled off. All that remained was a curiosity to find out more about my religion, and a growing drug habit, the latter, in the end, putting paid to the former.

Unfortunately, the sensible ritual of making it all over within seven days (apart from the stone setting, a year later) does not translate so neatly to the hearts and mind of those left behind. But I like the message, to get on with life. It only took me about another 25 years to figure that one out.

‘Clean’ is published by Short Books