What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Death?

We say we need to talk about death.

I argued that in the first essay in this series. We avoid the subject as though mentioning death might somehow summon it, as though preparing for the inevitable were an act of surrender rather than an act of love.

But once we decide that we need to talk about death, a harder question follows.

What, exactly, are we supposed to say?

I have spent enough time in hospital rooms, funeral homes, cemeteries, and shiva houses to know that most of us have no idea.

We have the order almost completely backwards.

Before death, when there is still so much that needs to be said, we are silent.

After death, when silence may be exactly what is required, we cannot stop talking.

Before death, we avoid.

After death, we explain.

Judaism asks something different of us.

Before death: speak.

After death: learn how to listen.

There are words that should never be saved for a eulogy.

I love you.

I am proud of you.

You changed me.

Thank you.

I am sorry.

I forgive you.

Will you forgive me?

I learned this from you.

I need you to know something.

One of the strange privileges of being a rabbi is hearing people become astonishingly eloquent about someone who can no longer hear them.

A son stands at a lectern and tells us that everything good in him came from his father.

A granddaughter describes the woman who taught her what courage looked like.

A friend tells a story from thirty years earlier, a kindness so small that the person who performed it probably forgot it by dinner, but the recipient carried it for the rest of his life.

And sometimes, standing a few feet from the casket, I find myself wondering:

Did they know?

Did anyone tell them?

We should give the eulogy early.

Not literally. Please do not invite your mother to lunch, unfold three pages, and announce that you have prepared remarks.

But tell her what the remarks would say.

Tell your father what you learned from him.

Tell your teacher that something she said thirty years ago is still living inside you.

Tell your friend why the friendship mattered.

Tell your children what makes you proud of them.

Say the words while there is still someone on the other side of the sentence to receive them.

And then there are the harder conversations.

What do you want if you become seriously ill?

Who should speak for you if you cannot speak for yourself?

What makes life worth living for you?

What treatments would you want?

What treatments would you not want?

Where are the documents?

Where do you want to be buried?

What kind of funeral do you imagine?

What Jewish rituals matter to you?

What are you afraid of?

What do you believe happens when we die?

What do you hope happens?

Who needs to hear something from you?

What story about our family cannot be allowed to disappear?

These are not morbid questions.

They are love questions.

My grandmother had an answer to one of them.

She believed deeply that when she died, she would see her family again.

Her father, who had been murdered.

Her mother.

The relatives who had died before her.

She did not speak about this as an intellectual proposition or a theological puzzle. She believed deeply there would be a reunion.

She expected to see them again.

I do not know exactly what happens when we die. None of us does. Jewish tradition gives us images and arguments, Gan Eden and Olam HaBa, resurrection and the immortality of the soul. It gives us centuries of rabbis trying to speak about something none of them had seen.

But my grandmother knew what she hoped for.

And I knew what she hoped for.

That matters.

Her belief did not make her less attached to this life. It did not make the people around her less precious. If anything, it placed her life inside a much longer story. Death might end a life, but in her understanding it could not finally erase relationship.

When her death came, I did not have to wonder what she believed.

She had already told us where, in her heart, she believed she was going.

Maybe that is part of what these conversations are for.

Not so that every family arrives at the same theology.

Not so that everyone dies with certainty.

But so that we know one another.

Because someday, if we refuse to ask the practical questions, someone we love may be standing in a hospital hallway trying to guess.

I have watched families do this.

Everyone is exhausted. Nobody has slept. The doctor is asking a question that feels impossible. One sibling remembers Dad saying one thing. Another remembers something completely different. Everyone wants to honor him. Nobody knows what honoring him means.

That is the cost of silence.

And sometimes the silence costs even more while a person is still alive.

We tell ourselves that talking honestly about death means giving up on life.

Judaism does not believe that.

A person can pray for healing and still prepare for death.

A family can hope desperately for another year and still ask what happens if that year does not come.

Hope and honesty are not enemies.

Sometimes, in fact, our insistence on hope becomes its own kind of cruelty.

A person says, quietly, “I think I may be dying.”

And someone immediately answers:

“Don’t talk like that.”

Why not?

The person in the bed already knows what the rest of us are trying not to know.

“I’m scared.”

“You’re going to beat this.”

Maybe.

God willing.

But perhaps what that person needed in that moment was not a prediction.

Perhaps he needed someone strong enough to move the chair a little closer and say:

“Tell me what scares you.”

There is a terrible loneliness in being the only person in the room permitted to know that you may be dying.

We sometimes ask the sick to carry two burdens: the possibility of their own death, and everyone else’s inability to hear them speak about it.

They endure the scans, the treatments, the uncertainty, the loss of control.

And then they reassure us.

They stay positive for us.

They protect us from the truth they are already living inside.

That is not hope.

That is loneliness.

And then death comes.

And suddenly we reverse ourselves.

Now everybody wants to talk.

Jewish tradition is surprisingly suspicious of this impulse.

There is a remarkable law about entering a house of mourning.

The visitor does not begin the conversation.

The mourner does.

The rabbis derive this from the book of Job.

Job’s friends hear of his catastrophe and come to him. They see him from a distance and barely recognize him. They tear their garments. They throw dust upon their heads. They sit beside him on the ground.

And for seven days and seven nights, they say nothing.

Only after Job opens his mouth do they begin to speak.

And that is when everything goes wrong.

For seven days, Job’s friends may be the finest pastoral caregivers in the Bible.

Then they become theologians.

They begin explaining.

Surely suffering must have a reason.

Surely the universe must make sense.

Surely Job must have done something.

Surely there is a lesson hidden somewhere inside the catastrophe.

They cannot tolerate Job’s suffering without making it intelligible.

Eventually their need to explain his pain becomes more important than Job himself.

We still do this.

Someone dies and the silence frightens us, so we rush to fill it.

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“She’s in a better place.”

“God needed another angel.”

“At least he didn’t suffer.”

“At least she lived a long life.”

“At least you had forty wonderful years together.”

I have come to believe that “at least” may be among the most dangerous ways to begin a sentence in a shiva house.

At least she lived to ninety.

She wanted ninety one.

At least you had forty years.

He wanted forty years and one more morning.

At least you have your other children.

Children are not interchangeable.

“At least” is often our attempt to make grief reasonable. To remind the mourner that things could have been worse. To locate a patch of sunlight because we cannot bear to sit in the dark.

But grief does not require perspective.

A person can be grateful for every year and still want one more.

A widow can know she had a magnificent marriage and still hate going to bed alone.

A son can know that his father died peacefully at ninety four and still reach for the phone the next morning before remembering there is nobody to call.

Gratitude does not cancel grief.

Judaism does not ask it to.

It asks us to accompany the mourner inside it.

There is a story told about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Two towering Jewish thinkers. Two very different religious temperaments. Men who spent their lives producing words: books, lectures, interpretations, entire ways of understanding God, Torah, and the human condition.

As the story is told, they learned that someone was sitting shiva in Boston.

They took the train.

Hours of travel.

They arrived at the house.

They sat with the mourner.

They essentially said nothing.

When it was time to leave, they embraced the mourner and returned home.

Think about that.

Two of the greatest Jewish minds of the twentieth century apparently decided that the mourner did not need their ideas.

No theology.

No explanation.

No attempt to make suffering coherent.

They came.

They sat.

They embraced.

They left.

The train ride was part of what they said.

Showing up was what they said.

The embrace was what they said.

Hours of effort culminating in silence.

And nothing was missing.

We imagine that comforting someone means finding the right words.

Judaism suggests that comfort may begin when we relinquish the need to say anything impressive at all.

That is why the mourner speaks first.

It is not merely etiquette.

It is kindness encoded as halakhah.

For seven days, the mourner does not have to take care of us.

He does not have to host.

He does not have to entertain.

He does not have to answer, “How are you?”

How do we think he is?

He does not have to tell us exactly how the person died because we are curious.

He does not have to reassure us that everything will be okay.

He does not have to defend God.

He does not have to be wise.

He does not have to be inspirational.

He does not even have to speak.

You enter.

You sit.

You wait.

That is harder than it sounds.

The silence stretches for three seconds, then five, and every social instinct tells us to rescue the room.

Don’t.

Let the mourner own the silence.

If she wants to talk about her mother’s final hours, listen.

If she wants to talk about her mother’s brisket, listen.

If she tells the same story she told yesterday, listen again.

If she wants to talk about football because she has spent two days discussing death and cannot bear another minute of it, talk about football.

The mourner chooses the conversation.

Grief has already taken so much control away.

Jewish tradition gives a little of it back.

And if there is an opening, tell a story.

Not a lesson.

A story.

“I remember your father doing something I have never forgotten.”

“I don’t know if your mother ever told you this…”

“Every time your husband saw me, he would…”

There may be few greater gifts at shiva than giving a mourner a memory he did not know existed.

Because something terrible has happened.

No new memories with this person will ever be made.

That archive has closed.

And then someone walks through the door carrying a memory from twenty years ago.

For a moment, something thought lost forever is returned.

Give it to the family.

And say the name.

We sometimes become afraid to say the name because we fear reminding the mourner of what happened.

Trust me.

You are not reminding him that his wife died.

He remembers.

He remembered when he woke up.

He remembered when he reached for her side of the bed.

He remembered when he poured one cup of coffee instead of two.

You are not reminding him that she is dead.

You are reminding him that she lived.

You are reminding him that someone else remembers her too.

There is an enormous difference.

Eventually, the visit ends.

Traditionally we say:

HaMakom yenachem etchem betoch she’ar aveilei Tzion v’Yerushalayim.

May HaMakom comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

HaMakom.

The Place.

One of Judaism’s names for God.

I cannot think of a more extraordinary name to invoke when someone has lost a person who occupied an irreplaceable place in the world.

And notice the humility of the blessing.

We do not say:

I will comfort you.

Because I cannot.

I cannot replace your husband.

I cannot explain your daughter’s death.

I cannot make tomorrow morning less empty.

I cannot tell you why one person lives and another dies.

I cannot give you a theology powerful enough to make the grave reasonable.

HaMakom yenachem.

May comfort come.

May God hold what I cannot hold.

May the Jewish people surround you.

May this community become a place large enough for your grief.

Perhaps that is what a Jewish community is ultimately for.

Not only weddings.

Not only babies.

Not only b’nei mitzvah.

A Jewish community exists because there are moments in human life no one should have to carry alone.

That is why Kaddish requires a minyan.

The mourner may feel utterly alone.

Judaism insists on putting other Jews in the room.

You say the words.

We answer.

Amen.

We cannot solve death.

We cannot explain every tragedy.

We cannot raise the dead.

But we can get on the train.

We can drive across town.

We can enter the house.

We can sit down.

We can remember the name.

We can tell the important truths while there is still time for them to be heard.

And when there are no words that can improve the moment, we can stop trying to manufacture them.

Maybe that is what we talk about when we talk about death.

Before death, say what matters.

Ask the frightening questions.

Tell the stories.

Make the decisions.

Tell me what you believe.

Tell me what you fear.

Tell me whom you expect to see again.

Say “I love you.”

Say “I am sorry.”

Say “thank you.”

Do not save the essential words for the cemetery.

And after death?

Come.

Sit.

Listen.

Say the name.

Tell the story.

Hold the hand.

Give the hug.

Stay long enough that the mourner understands you are not frightened by his grief.

And when there is nothing more to say, be quiet.

We have the order backwards.

Before death, when there is still so much that needs to be said, we are silent.

After death, when silence may be exactly what is required, we cannot stop talking.

Jewish tradition asks us to learn both forms of courage:

The courage to speak while there is still time.

And the courage, when words can no longer fix anything, simply to sit beside another human being and remain.

My grandmother believed that when her life ended, people she had loved and lost would be waiting for her.

Maybe she was right.

I hope she was.

What I know is that she told us.

And there is something sacred in that too.

To know what someone you love hopes lies beyond the edge of life.

To know what frightens them.

To know whom they miss.

To know what they want.

To know what they need you to hear while they can still say it.

And then, someday, when they can no longer speak, to know enough not to fill the silence with explanations.

Sometimes that is the whole mitzvah.

Sometimes that is the whole theology.

Sometimes that is love.