Where do they go?

I recall with clarity, from the time my brother and I were in elementary school, climbing into the back seat of my father’s Dodge Dart to make our annual trek up the old two-lane Merritt Parkway to the north shore of Massachusetts. The sole purpose of that six-hour drive was to go to the cemetery.

While we’d been told how important it was to pay our respects to those close relatives who had died years before we were born, I dreaded the trek to Lynn, Danvers, and North Reading. Not only did it make my parents— my mother in particular —-very sad, but it took time away from our short school vacations.

We knew not to complain as we solemnly followed my parents through the rickety gates of old cemeteries, meandering through rows and rows of headstones with strangers’ names, mostly in Hebrew. When we’d arrive at the graves of my mother’s and father’s loved ones, they’d stop to pray, to mourn, to look back — retrieving memories of sisters, fathers, aunts, and uncles.

Sometimes, my mother would talk to her late father and sister in Yiddish, likely sharing news of me, my brother, and our family. She’d speak to them as if they were really there — in that spot under the ground — waking from their slumber just long enough to hear her. Before we departed, she and my father would mark their visit by placing a rock on each of their loved ones’ headstones.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood the therapeutic value of making visits to a loved one’s resting place. But as a young girl, and sometimes even now, as I stand with reverence at the burial spots of those who’ve passed before me, magically thinking the deceased person to whom I’m speaking can hear me, I can’t help but wonder — where do they go?

When we took the Kuder Career Interest Assessment tests in  eighth grade, my matches were to what then were called “helping professions” —guidance counselor, nurse or teacher. It was 1974, so it is possible that most girls my age got similar results. But I was pleased with the test’s accuracy

At Penn State University, in the College of Health and Human Development, I majored in individual and family studies. I had to choose between four areas — early childhood, adolescence, gerontology, or family planning. Because I’d been close to both my grandmothers and had a knack for talking to the elderly, I chose gerontology.

In my senior year, I enrolled in “Death and Dying,” a seminar where we studied the works of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Dr. Charles Corr, Oliver Sacks, Lyn Lofland, and others. I did an internship with ElderHostel, supervising dormitory housing for seniors who came to the campus to audit classes and take part in social activities. I helped organize events. I accompanied participants to and from the dining hall and their classes. I enjoyed their company and listened attentively to stories of lives well lived.

Up until then, I had attended only one funeral; that of my paternal grandfather, Simon, who died during my senior year of high school. All the arrangements were made by my late father, David, and his younger brother, Larry. I do not recall the funeral service, but when we arrived at my grandparents’ apartment in Swampscott for shiva, I was surprised when, as if by magic, the octagonal shadow-box cabinet with the mirrored back displaying my nana’s prized knickknacks was covered with a sheet. Same with the mirrors in the bathroom and their bedroom. The coffee table was filled with plates of rugelach and my Baba Gussie’s poppy seed cookies. The next fall, I wrote my first college essay, in English 101, about my grandfather’s death and how losing him had affected me. I got an A.

My Death and Dying class included a field trip to a funeral home, where the funeral director spoke to us and answered questions. He showed us the preparation room, the refrigerators, and a softly lit room with all types of urns and caskets. As was typical at Penn State, there were far more non-Jews than Jews in my class. I knew that Jews were to be buried in pine boxes and that cremation was forbidden by Jewish law. I did not know anything about embalming, but later I learned that it was another process forbidden by Jewish law.

I recall being extremely uncomfortable both with my surroundings in the funeral home and with the seeming lightheartedness with which the staff and my classmates broached a subject that I’d always thought was off limits. I tried to pay attention but was eager to leave. I excused myself to use the restroom, but instead I made my way toward the bus that waited in the parking lot. I must’ve made a wrong turn because I opened a door that I thought led to the exit. I was wrong. It opened to a room where a body was being prepared for a viewing. When I saw the body lying on a table, I was so shocked, so terrified, so unmoored, that I turned to run and collided with my professor, who looked at me and said, “Miss Miller, it looks as if you’d seen a ghost!” And I felt as if I had.

With one trimester left of my senior year of college, I scheduled an urgent meeting with my advisor and switched my emphasis to family planning.

Seven years later, after a successful post-graduate career managing women’s health and wellness clinics in Los Angeles, I relocated to Boston. I spent my weekends with my paternal grandmother, my widowed Nana, taking her to Stop&Shop for groceries and lunching at Bickford’s Pancake House in Swampscott. In December of that year, my maternal grandmother, my Baba, who was also a widow, died. She’d been living at the Daughters of Miriam Nursing Home in Clifton, near my parents’ home in Fair Lawn, but her cemetery plot was in North Readding, Massachusetts, next to her late husband’s.

Unlike my grandfather’s funeral 10 years earlier, I recall my Baba’s funeral well.

It was a graveside service on a bitter cold New England morning. Many of my grandmother’s contemporaries had died, but there were just enough men to make a minyan. Other than family, it seemed as if no one at the funeral was under 90. I recall that the temperature was well below zero and everyone was bundled in layers of clothing.

While everybody else stood around the gravesite reciting kaddish, I stood on the periphery, anxious and afraid. My Baba and I had been so close, so interconnected, I felt as though I were losing an appendage. While I understood intellectually that human remains generally are buried, when the cemetery workers began to slowly lower her casket into the pit, I screamed, “Don’t put her in there! Don’t put her in there!” And when I heard that painful thud of the dirt that the mourners shoveled on top of her casket, I heard my voice cry out, “Stop shoveling dirt on her! Stop it!”

I’ve tried to block the painful memories of  that December day, but what remains clear is that my father, my older brother, and my older cousin had to hold me back from my Baba’s burial pit. Had they not been as strong as they were, I’d have toppled in with her.

I am now a 66-year-old wife, mother, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister, aunt, and niece. I have been a primary advocate in health care decisionmaking and throughout the painstaking process of death for six elder relatives: my beloved parents, my beloved in-laws, and my beloved aunt and uncle, who did not have children of their own. I was with all of them at the end. In each case, I took time to stare at their faces, their hands, their necks, their palms, for how long I don’t know, checking for a grimace, an involuntary movement, a pulse. With each of them, my mind played tricks on me as I fixated on their chests for the faintest rise or shudder, an attempt at revival — a beating heart.

My father died in November 2012, right after Hurricane Sandy. We didn’t think that our out-of-town relatives would make it to his funeral. But somehow, although there were few passable roads and even fewer flights into or out of Newark Airport, his brother, Larry, and his nephew, Dan, were able to fly in from California. I recall the moment when my mother’s doorbell rang, late in the evening before the funeral. When I moved the window curtain aside and saw their faces, I thought I was hallucinating. “Is it really you?” I asked. It was. When people love you, they show up in life and death.

The day of my father’s funeral, we gathered at Robert Schoem’s Memorial Chapel, and the rabbi gave us a small black cloth to tear, then pin on our shirts. After reciting the Krieh prayer, the immediate family was invited into the chapel to say a final goodbye to my father. The funeral director opened the cover of the casket for this purpose. My heart skipped a beat. It had been just two days since I’d watched my father die.

First, my mother, then my Uncle Larry, then my brother, my husband, and my cousin knelt down and kissed my father. My husband asked me if I wanted to see my father. Somehow, I was brought back to that moment at the funeral home in State College, Pennsylvania. I was terrified but didn’t want to be the only one not to participate in this final tribute. I looked, albeit quickly, at the man lying there, draped in a shroud, with sallow skin and sunken cheeks. I knew he was my father, but he didn’t look like my father. I grabbed my husband’s hand. He nodded to the funeral director to close the casket. My father’s life had ended.

After sitting shiva for seven days, my mother, my brother, and I went for the traditional walk around the block. I decided to take another loop around the park in Radburn by myself. I was eager to call my best friend, Dee, who is more like a sister. She’d been gracious enough to sit vigil with me and my mother at the hospice facility on Prospect Avenue in Hackensack throughout the week before my father’s death. She’d kept our spirits up, joining us each evening for food deliveries from the Chit Chat Diner on Essex Street.

Dee grew up in a traditional Catholic home. She’d gone to many wakes with open caskets. She wasn’t afraid to view, kneel, and pray at the base of a casket holding a body that may or may not be dressed with handsome clothing and wearing makeup, holding important trinkets or rosary beads, surrounded by magnificent flower displays. Accustomed to the traditional Catholic funeral mass, she was struck by the simplicity and beauty of the Jewish funeral customs she’d witnessed. When we eventually connected by phone, Dee was relieved to hear from me. “Deb, how are you doing?” she’d asked.

“All I can think about is how my dad looked in that casket, Dee,” I said. “I can’t get that visual out of my head, and I’m afraid I never will.” She gave me her word that there would be a time, when I would least expect it, when I would think about my father and see the vibrant, handsome, broad-shouldered, strong, and striking man he was. It took some time, a long time actually, but eventually I told her she’d been right.

At the end of March, my father’s younger brother, Larry, died. He’d have been 84 in June, the same age my father was when he died. There was no question I would be at his funeral in Riverside, California. He and I shared a special bond, and despite the physical distance between us, he’d lovingly served as somewhat of a surrogate father for me.

He died just before Passover, and that made scheduling the funeral difficult; they are not allowed on the first or last two days of the holiday. So my uncle’s funeral was scheduled for more than a week after he died. I arrived in southern California on a magnificently sunny, blue-skied day. Temple Beth El’s rabbi emerita, Suzanne Singer, gathered the family in the rabbi’s study and handed each of us a square of black cloth that would be torn before it was pinned to our clothing. After reciting the Krieh prayer, she read a poem, written by the late Rabbi Harold Schulweis, called “Mourning.” I was struck by one of the stanzas:

“So strange to a tradition
“that admonishes
“not to break or to destroy
“It is for the sake of anger
“against the unfairness of the world
“anger against him or her, God or self?
“Is tearing the cloth to give outer expression
“to the tattered soul within?”

Throughout the funeral service, while the rabbi spoke, while the cantor chanted, while a video montage danced on a screen accompanied by a cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” while my cousins eulogized their father and even while I eulogized my uncle, I considered my need, which had gathered speed and substance throughout the years of facing many deaths, to give outer expression to my tattered soul. My eyes welled with tears. I hadn’t made peace with death.

At the burial site in Olivewood Cemetery, Rabbi Singer reminded us that the body being lowered in the ground was just that: my uncle’s physical body. It was his soul that would remain with each of us — in our memories, in our deeds, in our actions, in our traditions and customs, in our values. Kaddish emphasizes life and our faith.

As I took my turn at the shovel to gather a bit of earth to cover the casket that held the body of my beloved uncle, I chose not to fear the thud of the dirt on the wood. I chose instead to accept that while our faith tells us that this last act of paying respects to the dead is a way to honor the dead and acknowledge that death is real, it is not the end.

I know now that the people I’ve loved and lost will always remain with me. When dying is over, a different kind of memory takes over — a memory of the heart.

Deb Breslow of Wyckoff is a freelance writer and college essay coach whose published work highlights topics specific to home, family, medical advocacy and Jewish causes. For the last three years, she has been contributing personal essays and reported work to the Jewish Standard and the New Jersey Jewish News.