One example of the different ways my wife and I have mourned stems from our different approaches to tradition. The traumatic loss binds me to the Gregorian calendar date, December 17th – the day our son decided to end his life. My wife, for her part, feels strongly that we should observe Ariel’s yahrzeit on the Hebrew date. We have resolved this issue by observing both the Gregorian and Hebrew dates. Although this has often led to an emotionally excruciating six-days of mourning (!), in this manner both our needs have been met.
For me, following the rhythm of the Jewish calendar in a natural way is one of the many reasons why I love living in Israel. I feel connected to my people, history, land and especially Judaism’s customs. Despite that, observing the Hebrew date, which changes yearly vis a vis the Gregorian calendar, detracts from my ability to mourn.
During the past nine years, I have been both comforted and alienated by tradition. The mitzvah of shiva –sitting in one’s house for seven days in mourning as the community attends to all one’s needs – was meaningful and comforting. The mourner is commanded to sit and mourn; the community is commanded to visit the mourner in silence. The shiva is a gift. I cannot fathom how people can lose a loved one and then go to work the next day. Jewish tradition instructs us to get up from the shiva on the last day and to take a walk around the block. What a beautiful and powerful concept that we are allowed to mourn, but not endlessly. We must sit, but then we must get up and return to the world outside the comfort of our homes and the support of the community. Judaism understood the importance of “riding through” long before I did. We sit – and then we stand and move.
Sitting shiva for Ariel was a gift, but not an easy one to appreciate. The house was teeming with people, and already from the outset, family members preferred to sequester in their private corners – understandably so. As such, I was thrust into the role of welcomer/explainer/spokesperson. There is no work or exercise during the seven days, yet I was exhausted.
My wife’s family were deeply supportive and loving, and our friends from the Kol HaNeshama community (a Reform synagogue to which we belong) could not have been more helpful: providing us with meals, doing our laundry, even washing our floors. Yet, it was all so overwhelming. I yearned for the afternoon 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm afternoon break that we had instituted (often a shiva can run from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 pm straight through) so I could sleep, read books about suicide and simply be by myself and enjoy the quiet.
The shiva felt like one big hug. We were not alone, and were comforted. Why, then, did I feel alienated from parts of the tradition when I found such solace in the shiva? My wife and I started saying kaddish for our son every Shabbat, believing that we would be saying kaddish for the next 11 months. To our dismay, we learned that the halacha (Jewish Law) requires saying kaddish for only one month when mourning a child, unlike the 11 months for a deceased parent. My wife shared with me her decision to recite the kaddish prayer for 11 months. Observing tradition was weighing on my conscience, but I knew that she was right. We simply could not abide by tradition in this instance.
Conversely, I did not need or want to mourn 11 months for my father, as much as I loved and respected him. Consequently, I stopped saying kaddish at a certain point. While feeling strong, solid, and grounded, my heart had a limited amount of emotional bandwidth. I was, and still am, grieving so much for Ariel, that it has been hard to find the room in my heart to properly mourn my father. I have many friends who do not feel bound by Jewish law but would never consider going to weddings during the 11 months of mourning for a parent. Yet, I went to several weddings during the first year of mourning my father because I decided to celebrate his life in my own way.
I feel obligated to know Jewish tradition, but I also feel obligated to find my own way through grief, to follow my heart so I may continue in the healing process. I use the phrase healing process and not “heal,” because it is not a finite concept. Unlike what Elizabeth Kubler Ross posits in, “The Five Stages of Grief,” acceptance, the last stage of mourning, is not something that has a definitive ending point. For me, grieving is a healing process, not a stage. As such, acceptance will always be ongoing for me.
I am in a process of healing, and during this process, I will continue to view Jewish tradition with profound respect. And, concomitantly, I will follow my need and commitment to make decisions that are congruent with my own individual process of grief. In some way, this does in fact follow tradition. On the way to the cemetery to bury my father, Rabbi Wernick from the Or Olam Synagogue asked my mother a question connected to the burial procedure and my mother replied, “What is the tradition?” Rabbi Wernick unhesitatingly responded, “The tradition is that as your rabbi I am here to comfort you, so whatever you decide is what we’ll do.”
Amen! A Jewish tradition based on the individual needs of the mourner is a Judaism that I will follow as I continue my journey riding through life.