My mother's uncle died on Friday. He was eighty seven years old, had Parkinson's disease and had spent the past month in the hospital, so his death didn't exactly come as a shock. The funeral was this morning and I learned an interesting bit of family history. This uncle and his sister, my long-gone grandmother, used to shower at the local "Y" instead of showering at their home. Why? Because their father had turned their bathtub into a whiskey distillery. Oh yes, that's right, he was a bootlegger in the age of prohibition. When you consider that my grandfather on my mother's side was a card-carrying Communist and labor organizer in the Jimmy Hoffa tradition, my mother's family looks really interesting...
Anyway, after the funeral we went to my uncle's house to sit Shiva (pronounced like a Bostonian pronouncing "shiver"). This is a week-long Hebrew tradition that involves nightly prayers and the family sitting around talking about the dead. Friends and non-immediate family bring food for the week and the immediate family covers the mirrors. The idea here, as I understand it, is that you don't think about the normal things you think about in life - cooking or hygiene - for the week so that you can worry, instead, about coping with your loss. As far as mourning rituals go it's probably one of the best in terms of helping.
All the same, I think I'd rather if we had been sitting Shiva (pronounced with an "e" as in "evil") instead. You know, Shiva the Destroyer, the Hindu god of destruction. Imagine a group of elderly Jews, some of them orthodox and with long beards, sitting around discussing my uncle George with the giant blue-skinned, four-armed cosmic dancer wreathed in flame. Or better yet, picture the elderly Jews sitting and talking while Shiva utters his sacred mantra "om" and rampages, Godzilla style, around town.
These are the things I think about at funerals.
Om. Seriously. Om.