The definitive guide to the rituals of shiva is a book called The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning by Rabbi Maurice Lamm. Several copies awaited my family upon our return from the cemetery, dropped off by our shul. The books were part of a bigger tableau that included special mourner chairs that were low to the ground, a folding table covered in twenty-four-hour yahrzeit candles, a portable aron kodesh (an ark) containing a small torah scroll for daily morning prayers, and a stack of well-worn siddurim, or prayer books.
In most shiva houses, mourners sit together in one spacious area, usually the living room. But we were too many people, of too many ages, with too many friends. So, aside from that first day of shiva when we banded together to try to mourn as a team, my siblings and I scattered around the house and sat in our own little clusters.
After wordlessly picking at a meal that included the requisite hardboiled eggs — a symbol of the circle of life — we took our places sitting in the semicircle of short-legged mourning chairs. A handful of close friends who’d escorted us from the burial sat facing us in seats of a normal height and were the first to officially offer their condolences. They were performing the mitzvah of being menachem avel, the term used for a condolence call which means “comforting the mourners” and over the course of the week, it would be standing room only for most of our waking hours. Being menachem avel ranks pretty highly as mitzvot go and it’s not unusual for community members with even the loosest ties to the deceased to visit a shiva house.
Comforting a mourner is not easy. Sitting with someone else’s pain can be deeply uncomfortable. While the week of shiva is an opportunity to remember the deceased, it’s really about comforting the mourners in their time of grief while they forgo creature comforts like freshly laundered clothes and listening to music. It’s harder to offer comfort to someone when what they are allowed to receive is so limited (although there was no limit to how much food we could have). Seeing the forlorn faces of my mother’s friends, hearing them reminisce about how she was the life of the party and loved to laugh didn’t bring me comfort so much as it amplified the tragedy of her death. “You should know no more tsuris” — may no more hardship befall you — was the typical refrain by visitors who tried to wish us well in the face of such devastation. I found this protocol less comforting, more overwhelming.
For me, comfort meant sitting with my friends, tucked away downstairs in my room. It meant being a twenty-year-old with other twenty-year-olds who understood what I needed most: to alleviate the heaviness of the atmosphere with laughter. Besides, my mother had been so sick for so long, my grief over her death was balanced by relief that her suffering was finally over.
I dragged my shiva chair downstairs and held court there. My siblings and I retreated to our corners to grieve privately because watching each other do it was too unbearable, mirroring back on ourselves what we looked like. Gita, with her blue eyes, flaming red curls, and pillowy cheeks brought all of us the most comfort. She flitted from room to room, sometimes sitting on my father’s lap, sometimes tearing through my room and squealing with laughter while my friends chased her, bringing joy to mourners and visitors alike with her blissful ignorance. Her presence, of course, highlighted the sheer magnitude of our loss.
Early the next morning, several men arrived to form a minyan, the group of ten men required for Shacharit, thus kicking off the first full day of shiva. Miryam, Rivky, and I would have been welcome to join the services from the adjacent dining room or kitchen but did not count toward a minyan and, frankly, we were just as happy to sleep a bit later before the waves of visitors began to arrive.
Neighbors got to work triaging the parade of food that flowed in. Pans of lasagna, a large platter of deli meat, cookies, chocolate babka cakes, meatballs and spaghetti … All this was before the days of those handy meal-planner websites. My family held by the rule that food brought into a shiva house did not leave. So, it was either consumed by us, a bunch of sad people whose movement was limited and were therefore not building up much of an appetite, or it was disposed of. Some of it was frozen to be eaten sometime later that week/month/year/decade. Tamar, by far the most organized of my friends, made herself busy rearranging pans and containers of food in both the kitchen freezer and the spare one in the basement like some culinary game of Tetris, until there was simply no more space. One time, Babi Becky caught her doing this and went ballistic that she was wasting food even though the stuff Tamar got rid of was inedible. Thirty years later, when I asked Tamar what she remembered most about my mother’s shiva, it was this encounter with Babi Becky.
Comforting a mourner is not easy. Sitting with someone else’s pain can be deeply uncomfortable.
The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning is full of guidelines on how to mourn, but that didn’t stop some people from adding their own made-up rules. Sometimes (often) my friends comforted me a little too well and our cackling carried up to the living room overhead where the mood was considerably more somber. Once, when our decibel level reached unreasonable heights, our neighbor Magda cracked open my bedroom door, poked her head in, and hissed in her thick Hungarian accent, “Excuse me ladies, please, this is very inappropriate,” before turning to me with “Gila, you’re sitting shiva, come on!” as if I’d for one second thought there might be another explanation as to why I was sitting on my childhood bedroom floor in a ripped shirt with greasy hair, surrounded by my friends who’d driven in from Brooklyn, Englewood, and Silver Spring, Maryland, among other places, in the middle of a Monday morning in June.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, meeting her judgmental gaze while keeping my head tilted down. But I wasn’t sorry. This was my shiva, my mother who had died, my place to say how I’d mourn — and laughter, last time I’d checked, wasn’t on the “don’t” list of the book. But I was too tired to tell her any of this and I let it go. Until she left the room, that is. We counted to ten and exploded into more laughter.
Among my visitors was Max who’d just graduated from Yeshiva University with a degree in finance and had recently joined the list of guys I’d been set up with. What distinguished Max from my previous, ill-fated blind dates was his wry sense of humor and our mutual love of reading. He had an advantage in that a friend rather than the matchmaker had introduced us. We’d met two months earlier and, by the time my mother died, had been out to dinner, the movies, and walks in Central Park close to a dozen times. Was I attracted to Max? Not especially. But he was compassionate and thoughtful and answered my insomniac phone calls in the middle of the night during my time of grief. I appreciated his attention. My mother never met him but had been hopeful about our prospects; after all, he was a nice YU boy from a fancy neighborhood. When I broke up with Max a few weeks after shiva, he asked me to consider him a friend and to call if I ever needed anything.
On day three of shiva, Max brought a huge deli platter (such a mensch) for lunch. A man I didn’t recognize intercepted my family’s attempts to dig in. “No meat allowed,” he insisted, snapping the clear, circular lid back onto the enormous plastic base.
“Are you sure?” I challenged. “I don’t think that’s right.”
“Eating meat is a sign of celebration; of course you can’t have meat,” he said confidently, but after consulting some other adults present and noting that we’d been eating roast chicken and meatballs for dinner all week, we double checked The Book. He was wrong. Sitting shiva was hard enough, we didn’t need any extra made-up rules to further our suffering.
Some of the legitimate rules were overbearing, and I took to finding loopholes around them. For instance, mourners are not allowed to wear laundered clothes and that includes underwear. Remember, we weren’t showering either, so you do the math. I reasoned that if someone else wore my underwear for a couple of hours, they’d no longer be considered “laundered” so Suri and Chani took several pairs of my cotton briefs and wore them over their own, thank you very much, and that is all you need to know about my creative problem-solving skills.
The week went on this way until it almost felt normal.
The start of each day was signaled by the tinkling of my father’s spoon against a glass mug as he stirred his Taster’s Choice instant coffee, followed by men’s footsteps coming up the stairs, and then Shacharit — morning prayers ending with the Mourner’s Kaddish recited by my father, brother, uncle, and grandfather. Miryam, Rivky, and I would emerge from our bedrooms ready to receive the day’s endless stream of visitors. The wafting smell of tuna salad, toasted challah, blintzes, or pasta meant that someone would soon be asking if any of us wanted to take a short break to eat lunch in the kitchen. We didn’t always want to. It was awkward to excuse ourselves when expectant visitors were standing right in front of us.
Another influx of men in the evening told us that it was time for Mincha and Maariv, the evening and night-time prayers followed by more recitations of Kaddish. At night, the number of visitors ballooned with people coming after work. It was a grueling schedule, but comforting in its predictability and effective in keeping us constantly engaged until nighttime when exhaustion would yank us into sleep before we had time to wallow in our pain. Each visit concluded with someone standing over us while reading the handwritten Hebrew words from a sign taped to the living room wall. The English translation was: “May the Lord comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”
Seven days after burying my mother, it was time to get up from shiva. After the Shacharit prayer, the men dissipated, our rabbi staying behind to usher us into our next phase of mourning.
“In a few moments, we’ll step outside and take a walk up the block,” he instructed. “It symbolizes your first steps back into the normal rhythm of life and officially marks the beginning of your shloshim period.”
On my way out, I paused in front of a familiar photo in the hallway. It’s a sepia-toned, old-timey saloon shot taken during the only family vacation we ever took to Disney World. Per the photographer’s directions, no one is smiling so we all have an acute case of resting bitch face. My mom used to stand before the portrait and comment on how jowly she looked in the photo — “I look like a chipmunk, Gi!”— touching her fingertips to her face and gently pulling it up and back. She couldn’t have been more than thirty-seven at the time. I’d always thought she looked elegant and pretty in that photo. I still did, and now I wondered if, in seventeen years, I’d think I looked like a chipmunk, too.
Losing our mother at the beginning of the summer allowed for a soft landing in terms of figuring out our new normal. My sisters had finished the school year, and I was living at home until the start of the new semester. My mother’s close friends continued to drop in with trays of hot food, to check on us, and to perhaps conjure their friend’s memory by standing in her house.
“You’ll drop out of college now and run the household, right?” was an assumption more than one of them made. Out loud. To my face.
With as much civility as I could muster, I assured them that Miryam and my father would manage while I worked and finished school and that I’d be home to help on the weekends. I resented them for being so cavalier about my future, for placing such little value on my career and education, both of which I saw as a path to the stability my mother lacked. My future also depended on me avoiding breast cancer and I turned my attention to learning how to protect myself. I dug through a stack of her medical records and found her oncologist’s phone number. I told the receptionist who I was and why I was calling, and she choked up.
“Your mom was something special, you know, hon? We really miss her around here,” she sniffled before giving me the name and contact details for a breast specialist. “You take good care of yourself, OK?” I assured her that was exactly what I planned to do.
Excerpt from Nearly Departed: Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences © Gila Pfeffer, 2024. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The Experiment. Available everywhere books are sold. theexperimentpublishing.com
Gila Pfeffer is a Jewish American humor writer and personal essayist whose work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Today.com, and others. Gila’s monthly “Feel It on the First” campaign reminds women to prioritize their breast health. She splits her time between New York City and London.