• Sitting Shiva

    The funeral service was well attended. Relatives from my father’s side sat in the front of the all-purpose chapel that was built on to the funeral home. Both of his parents outlived their son, though his father would die in two years, and one of his brothers would die six months after that. On the other side of the center aisle, I sat with my mother and brother, and behind us sat my father’s many friends and business associates. Friends and family combined, his death had gathered over one hundred people. My father was well liked.
    My brother wasn’t crying, so neither was I. He had warned me that morning of the dangers of such displays of emotion. “We have to stay strong. We’re the men of the house now.” “I understand.” I didn’t. Not really. I didn’t understand how I had been promoted from boy to man without notice, and I didn’t understand how someone could be here in the morning and be gone in the afternoon. Perhaps if their had been a body the whole ordeal would have been more believable. But there was no body, only a blandly painted urn filled with dust and rubble taken from the sight where, five days earlier, the building where my Father worked stood. Without a body, there was no proof that he was gone, and so hope lingered one like a demon whispering in my ear. Maybe, somehow, he survived the collapse, and the fall from a hundred stories up. Maybe he was still buried under the rubble, shouting for someone to dig him out. Tomorrow, or the next day, we would hear a knocking at our door, and there he would be, still wearing the same black suit he wore everyday to the office. He’d walk into the house, shake off the caking of dust that had clung to his hair and clothes, and everything would revert back to how it used to be.
    Even after the ceremony had ended, and we had driven in procession to the cemetery, it seemed unreal, like a dream too absurd to accept. As the empty coffin was lowered into its grave, the cemetery was filled with the sounds of prayer. Yit-gadal v'yit-kadash sh'may raba b'alma dee-v'ra che-ru-tay, ve'yam-lich mal-chutay b'chai-yay-chon uv'yo-may-chon uv-cha-yay d'chol beit Yisrael, ba-agala u'vitze-man ka-riv, ve'imru amen. From the moment the coffin touched earth, my mother, brother and I assumed the status of the Avel, the mourners, and our three days of Shiva began.
    The first day was the strangest. My family had never been very religious. We only attended services on high holy days, or when my parents felt guilty. But my mother’s mother insisted that we mourn in the traditional way, if only for three days. She would have preferred seven, but my mother had insisted on three. “The boys have already missed so much school,” she would say. “They need to be with their friends.” However, it is not the time commitment that is troublesome, but the seemingly arbitrary customs that come with sitting Shiva. For example, the Avel are not to eat food that they themselves prepare. Instead, our meals were supplied by friends and extended family. Some of them even cooked in our kitchen, while we sat in our living room on the aged and decrepit couch that had been exiled there from the family room five years earlier. The living room got no natural light, and the bulb in the floor lamp was weak and yellow, so in there the couch and those who sat on it could effectively fade out of the world. We weren’t allowed to shower, and my brother and I were not allowed to shave. Of course, the latter was not a concern, because we weren’t old enough to do so. We were forbidden from leaving the house, and forbidden from partaking in any recreational activity. Our attention was not to be divided.
    That evening, my mother sat in the living room with ten other women from synagogue. My brother and I, bored with the monotony of mourning, sat against the wall adjacent to the living room and eavesdropped.
    “We are very sorry for your loss.”
    “Thank you”
    “Anything you need, just let us know.”
    “Yes, anything at all.”
    “If you need someone to watch the kids...”
    “Yes”
    “…or help clean up around the house…”
    “We’re here for you”
    “…just give me a call.”
    “Thanks.”
    “They are so young. It must be hard on them.”
    “They’re good boys.”
    “Sweet as can be.”
    “Poor things.”
    “They will need you.”
    “Now, more than ever.”
    “Of Course.”

    I layed in bed for what felt like hours, but what may have been minutes. By the time the house had emptied on that final night of mourning, it was already past midnight. Usually, I went to sleep at 9; any later and I would fall asleep in school the next day. In the winter, the sky began to dim around 7, and by 8 it was dark enough to be considered night. But I had never experienced the sheer blackness of midnight before. This darkness covered the world like a blanket. It filled my room with heavy silence. Tomorrow, I would go back to school. I would endure the stares and whispers of the other students, who had heard of my families’ misfortune. To them, death was something foreign. It was a rare animal on display, something both horrible and fascinating, to look at, but not to touch. I didn’t manage to fall asleep until the sun was already scraping the sky, but I slept well, and didn’t dream.