Fellow mourners

December 19, 2010 - 11:01 AM by Jessica

From the movie, 'Shiva'

Mourning has a way of infiltrating the community around here. I don’t necessarily mean when someone dies in the community, and there is the cycle of funeral, shiva and ongoing mourning throughout the following eleven months. But rather when someone you know, not necessarily well, has a loss, and even that tenuous connection with them affects you, and your life. (For a good film on the subject, see ‘Shiva,’ a fairly recent Israeli film on the subject.)

I’d felt that way earlier in the week, as my boys’ ganenet was sitting shiva for her father, which meant, practically, that the gan was closed for several days. Clearly, not the easiest situation following Chanukah vacation but of course nothing could be done about it. Yet when she came back home and to work after being away for ten days and was telling me about the last days of her father’s illness and ensuing shiva, I felt closer to her than I’d felt in the last three months of having known her, because I knew what she was going through, having experienced it myself.

I was thinking about that on Friday after finishing my weekly grocery shopping. We were leaving the store, me with my cart and one of my boys in tow, when I stopped to buy some flowers from the guy who always sells outside our favorite local store. As I picked out a bunch of anemones, calaniyot, I noticed that the flower guy had grown a scruffy beard and was wearing a kippah, not his usual accoutrements. When I asked him about the beard, he told me that his wife had died two weeks ago and this was his first time back ‘at work.’

What do you say? I offered the usual words of sympathy, and said I hoped he would find some sense of relief in his mourning. Just words, because, really, what can I, a stranger, offer to that kind of loss? But I was struck by the fact that I had known he was in mourning, without saying a word, just by the scruffy beard on his face and the kippah on his head.

If anything, I was glad that mourning necessitated him, in his practice of it, to stop shaving for the 30 days of mourning and wear a kippah. Those physical signs let me know what was happening with him, and allowed me to offer my condolences. That’s what community is all about.

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