Memorial Days

by Geraldine Brooks

Orthodox Judaism divides mourning into phases. The most intense, aninut, is the time between the death and the burial. During aninut, grief is understood to be “stupefyingly intense.” The mourner is not even to be offered condolences since she is not in any state to be consoled.

Australia’s First Nations people take a very different approach. In this fifty-thousand-year-old culture with the longest continuing religion in the world, mourning is understood to impact the entire community of the deceased. In traditional communities everyone is nominally related by assigned kinships that define rights, responsibilities, and even who may marry whom. When someone dies, therefore, everyone who is part of that community takes part in rites known as Sorry Business, even if this means traveling a great distance. Each new arrival sets off another round of intense mourning.

For Filipino Catholics the ninth day after death is significant: mourners gather once again to pray. Hindus, after a cremation, mourn intensely for thirteen days. Mourners are considered unclean and must avoid sacred spaces and adhere to other taboos that set the mourning period apart from ordinary life. For Buddhists, ceremonies and prayers for the dead are conducted every seven days for seven weeks. After the ceremony on the forty-ninth day, the spirit of the deceased is thought to move on to its next incarnation.

She passed on some advice she received from a colleague, who had gotten it from Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “Do your work. It might not be your best work, but it will be good work, and it will be what saves you.” Deborah

I’m not sure if our modern secular world has the capacity to come up with a gentler way of dealing with bereavement. I don’t know if we can make room for something like Sorry Business, iddah, sheloshim, chehelom. I merely wish for the bereaved some time and space, however long, however short, for melancholy—what Victor Hugo described as the happiness of being sad.

This story of a death is the story that dominates my life. Here I have retold it, rethought it. But I can’t change it. Tony is dead. Present tense. He will be dead, in the present, in my present, for as long as I am alive. I cannot change that story. I can only change myself. Write the truest thing you know, said old man Hemingway. Dear reader, this is it.