Americans are confused about death. Or as anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy argues in her 2021 book, American Afterlives, they are “reinventing” it. The facts of death and grief are endlessly customizable, in Dawdy’s telling: a sort of cottage industry has arisen around planning, as one nurse consultant put it, “the best possible death.”
Cryonic preservation, “death doulas,” even compost services for one’s remains: Americans can select from these and countless other end-of-life options. Celebrations of Life, a Florida-based mortuary, offers everything from tailgate parties honoring deceased sports fans to bridge nights for departed card-game enthusiasts. DIY or “green” funerals are on the rise, and people have taken to incorporating the remains of loved ones into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Of course, some personalized tributes can be lovely—a garden planted with a lost loved one’s favorite flower, for example. But the leveling of traditions around loss and remembrance, combined with new pressures to “get death right,” has made navigating it all the more baffling.
The West’s Lost Understanding of Grief
A Reddit forum on grief offers countless examples of befuddled people left to figure out mourning for themselves. Some complain of the effort involved in planning Instagram-worthy “celebrations of life” while exhausted and anguished. Others seek advice on things like how to manage social obligations while grieving, or they wonder how many months of grieving is excessive. Countless people feel abandoned; one young man complained bitterly about the radio silence from his close friends after the death of his grandmother, noting that it seemed as if they were waiting for him to “‘get over it’ and go back to entertaining them.”
In defense of this man’s derelict friends, they may have had no idea what to do. Mourning etiquette has all but vanished in mainstream secular culture—the term “mourner” sounds almost archaic. A search of the Reddit grief forum’s main page brings up no instances of the word “mourn”; a blog post listing ways to mark “death anniversaries” also doesn’t mention it. Grief, meanwhile, is frequently invoked in technical, psychological terms.
Grief, of course, is a private affair; mourning is public. Mourning entails social obligations in the form of condolences, chapel ceremonies, donning black—any number of outward rituals. As robust expectations around how to honor the departed have dwindled, so have expectations regarding how to comfort people. Virtually all responsibility for marking and grieving death has been transferred from community leaders to mourners; those who wish to comfort people in their grief are left with little idea of how to do so. In other words, death is awkward for Americans.
A Countercultural Example: Mourning in Judaism
My family recently marked the second anniversary of my mother’s passing—her yahrtzeit, as it’s referred to in Jewish tradition. I recited the Mourner’s Kaddish prayer, as I or my brothers had done multiple times each day during our year of avelut, the Jewish mourning period for close relatives. I found myself marveling again at the elegance of avelut strictures, which stand in stark contrast to the highly individualized, secular approaches to loss so prevalent in the West.
Avelut operates in stages. It intricately structures one’s behavior though the first hours, weeks, month, and year of bereavement. It provides an extended period of contact with the departed; it does not allow adherents to ignore the fact of death or the need to honor the deceased.
Before discussing avelut further, though, it is worth noting the timing of my mother’s passing. It took place on a Saturday evening, as Shabbat ebbed and Jews around the world mark a transition from the holy to the mundane. It also coincided with the first day of Elul, the final month in the Jewish calendar.
The start of each month is a minor holiday in Judaism, with special prayers of thanksgiving and repentance. Elul, though, arrives like a thunderclap. A Hasidic saying proclaims that “the King is in the field”; God is understood to be especially close throughout the month. The shofar—an ancient musical horn mentioned throughout the Bible—is blown at morning services each weekday, calling hearers to repent. The sound is a distinctive mix of regal fanfare and woeful crying. As the Torah scholar Avi Garson explained in a recent essay on the topic (in part paraphrasing Maimonides):
The voice of the strange trumpet echoes suddenly through the air and rouses us from our repose; it is not the trumpet blown by the victor to announce his joy and triumph, nor the trumpet which sounds mournfully to tell defeat and shame. It is the shofar which warns us against dangerous sleep, and says: “Up ye that sleep, awake ye that slumber, recall to your mind the Creator, whose remembrance you have set aside; think of the truth which you have forgotten in the midst of worldly vanities, false pleasures and [delusions].”
Elul is a sort of coronation period, marking the close of one year and preparation for the year to come. Among other things, the Jewish new year celebrates the creation of the universe and God’s infinite sovereignty, with the understanding that God’s judgment for the year ahead is written on Rosh Hashanah.
Elul is thus a time of taking stock, reflecting on one’s misdeeds as well as human mortality and God’s kingship. Jews are enjoined to make amends with their fellows and seek forgiveness from and renewed closeness with the Creator. Throughout Elul and much of the subsequent month of Tishrei, Psalm 27 is recited twice daily, with its calls for hope in the Lord even or especially at times of sorrow. The sound of the shofar and the spiritual intensity of Elul were thus bound up with my family’s experience of loss.
In Jewish tradition, each life is understood as a world unto itself; to lose a life is to lose a world. At the news of my mother’s death, a distant cousin—really a cousin of a cousin—sent me a note on Facebook emphasizing that “the world is lost without her.” This seemed true; I had found myself on an alien planet: the Twilight Zone, a “middle ground between light and shadow,” as Rod Serling put it in the show’s introduction. But Jewish law draws mourners into this new terrain. “Better to go to a house of mourning than a house of feasting,” Ecclesiastes enjoins, “That is the end of every man, and the living shall lay it to heart.”
My family entered the state of aninut—deep sorrow or detachment—for my mom on a Saturday evening in a New York hospital. It ended on a hot Monday afternoon at her graveside in Israel. This first stage of avelut lasts from the moment of death until burial. During that time, ordinary prayers—the stuff of life for observant Jews, such as blessings upon eating or waking—are suspended for mourners. All attention is to be on the deceased and the sacred and urgent task of accompaniment, levayah, to the resting place. Aninut thus presents a wrenching departure from normal life, even as the break from regular religious practice can serve as a strange relief, a forceful reminder not to pretend things are normal.
We tore our clothes and prayed; aninut concluded and the long goodbye of the avelut year began. With ordinary religious practice restored, the sense of distance from the divine lessened a little; it was an early comfort.
We returned to New York to “sit shiva,” or observe the remaining week of bereavement. The colloquial phrase is apt; we sat on low chairs in my parents’ home, receiving people for hours each day. The mirrors were covered, and we were required to wear the clothing we had torn at the burial site throughout the week. Concern for the physical self recedes during shiva; I did not know what I looked like by the end. As I noted in personal reflections around that time,
You turn a corner expecting to see your face, and it’s not there. The mirrors are covered and you disappear to yourself. You remember that the person you are mourning won’t appear where you expect to see her, either.
Shiva stops you from hiding; there is nowhere to go. If at all possible, work is suspended. Daily prayer services with a quorum are held in the “shiva house.” Community members send an endless parade of dishes and serve the family at mealtimes; mourners are not to provide for themselves. We were charged with yielding control over our lives and residing in a state of partial dependence. Existence in this liminal space serves as an ongoing, visceral reminder of an altered world. It is also an ongoing act of accompaniment for the departed.
Again and again, with every visitor, and in the utter lack of distraction from our daily tasks, our thoughts were forcibly turned toward the person we were remembering and honoring. Shiva visitors, too, engage in a sacred obligation. We talked and talked about my mother with friends, neighbors, people we did not know who had known her. (Though it is worth noting that visitors are generally not to initiate conversation with mourners unless it’s about something practical like meal arrangements; it is up to the mourners to begin speaking or remain quiet. Sometimes, especially if the room is crowded, visitors simply sit quietly before reciting the standard departing blessing to mourners.) We passed around albums from weddings and trips and my mother’s childhood. Her life came into focus as everything else receded. It was exhausting and inescapable but felt entirely necessary.
Barely a week after my mother’s passing, I encountered another scene of public mourning. The day after shiva concluded, I left on a long-planned trip to England to visit an elderly relative, arriving on September 5th, one week to the day after my mother’s burial in Israel. On September 8th, Queen Elizabeth was pronounced dead. The famous mourning “queue” snaked through London as many thousands waited to pay their respects; the whole country seemed stricken. I felt less out of place than when I had arrived.
On September 12th—two weeks after my mother’s funeral—I sat in Heathrow airport awaiting my return flight to New York. It was delayed due to the Queen’s funeral, which was broadcast over large screens throughout the terminal. A nationwide moment of silence at the conclusion was broken by the sounding of trumpets—strikingly reminiscent of the shofar blasts I had heard nearly every day since my mother’s passing—after which we were instructed to board.
These experiences—of sitting shiva and almost immediately being surrounded by a nation of people paying respects to their sovereign—are stitched together in my mind; they each offered sanctioned, dignified ways of honoring the departed.
The rest of the year unfolded in an iterative process, with restrictions eased and mourning practices adjusted in ways that seemed very human, helping my family find our way through the new “middle ground.” After shiva, I could overhear music incidentally but not go out of my way to listen deliberately. After the first month, I could attend friends’ weddings but not dance—which can be a relief, to be sure! I recited the Mourner’s Kaddish daily up until the eleventh month of mourning when, according to Ashkenazi Jewish custom, it is suspended, to be recited once again on the anniversary of the loss. This stepping away from and then returning to the prayer helps prepare mourners for the end of the mourning period, providing a gentle rhythm at its close.
For my mother’s first yahrtzeit, we were fortunate to be able to return to Israel and visit her graveside; I later said Kaddish at the Western Wall. We seemed to be surrounded by the sounds of the shofar, which echo throughout Jerusalem in Elul.
Is Building a Culture of Chesed Possible for Us?
It is now Elul again, and I can look back at two years of incremental transformation. I first emerged from avelut struck by its genius, but the year after avelut is revelatory in its own way; I recall with great clarity the first full piece of music I listened to. The laws of avelut do not preclude people from honoring loved ones in creative ways—indeed, a group of my mother’s friends hosted a charitable mah-jongg event in her memory, as she was a regular mah-jongg player. But its expansive infrastructure—spiritual, emotional, and even material—shelters people at vulnerable moments. It answers many questions of the sort I found scattered throughout the Reddit forum.
Shiva especially is treated with great seriousness by Jewish communities; recently, as the bodies of certain Israeli hostages were returned to their families, requests for “shiva visitors” circulated widely throughout the country, so that even families living in remote places would have ample help and accompaniment. The positive obligation to visit mourners, combined with the straightforward and practical tasks needed to maintain a “shiva house,” help mitigate the natural human desire to look away from grief. All this creates a rich culture of chesed, loosely translated as acts of loving kindness.
Of course, most Americans will not begin adopting avelut practices in any kind of wholesale manner. But it offers insights into the human condition that may nonetheless be helpful—about the timing of the grief cycle, the need to honor the departed free from distraction, and how communities might adopt robust mourning structures to support those who are suffering.
Image by starflamedia and licensed via Adobe Stock.
