Maps of Grief

Yizkor Drash delivered at WRT on the morning of Shmini Atzeret, 5778.

Recently, I went drove out to the old cemetery in Queens where my great-grandparents -- whom I never met -- are buried. It’s one of those big, crowded cemeteries, where the burial plots are close together and the roads are narrow and winding. It had been several years since my last visit, and I wasn’t sure I remembered where to go. So I went into the cemetery office to ask for directions.

I told the clerk my great-grandparents’ names: Alexander and Jennie Reiser. She searched the cemetery database and said: “Died 1944 and 1968?” I told her that I did not remember. She smiled, and nodded reassuringly, as if to say, “Yes, but I remember.” She printed out a map of the grounds, and with a yellow highlighter drew a path through the cemetery’s maze of roads and plots. “Drive straight down Israel Street,” she said, “turn right on Matriarch’s Way, and there, just across Memorial Drive, they’ll be on your left. This is the way to your loved ones.”

If only it were this easy. If only there were a map, with clearly highlighted directions, that would bring us to our loved ones. If only we were gifted with the simple faith that someone or something more mysterious than the cemetery clerk holds an eternal record of the people who’ve come and gone before us. It’s easy enough to find a grave on a map. But once we’re there, how do we find the people whom we loved?

Helpfully, our tradition provides a map for this too -- a timeline of what to say and what to do. Step one: stay home for seven days. Cover the mirrors. Receive visitors. Step two: say kaddish for a month or a year, depending on who has died. Step three: at the end of one year, unveil a gravestone. Step four: light a Yahrzeit candle every year on the anniversary of death. Step five: visit and place a stone on your loved one’s grave.

This map of Jewish mourning is fairly simple. But where it leads, I cannot reliably say. It is intended to lead towards comfort and healing. But of course we know that even with the clearest of maps, a wanderer is liable to feel utterly lost.

Out there at the cemetery in Queens, even with a map in my hand, it is easy to feel lost. It’s a Sunday morning, and many parked cars line the one-lane roads. These roadblocks force me to venture from the clearly marked route on my map. I take a detour, thinking it will lead to my destination. But I am frustrated to discover that many of the roads in this cemetery are one-way only. Of course, this design is intended to help ease the flow of traffic, but I pause at the not-so-subtle reminder. Who better than a mourner understands that time moves in only one direction?

Kierkegaard wrote: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." We can’t go back in time and say that thing we wish we’d said, or unsay that thing we wish we hadn’t. We can’t hug people we never knew, like my great-grandparents, or be hugged one more time by people we knew and loved. Our map doesn’t lead backwards. It only allows us to look.

After turning down a few one-way roads, I arrive, circuitously, at a small family burial plot. Some names I know. Others sound like only echoes of the past. Who were Harold and Mimi Scheinberg? Who was Michael Berger? Even on the few gravestones whose names I recognize, there is so much left unexplained. She was “a beloved mother and sister.” But sister to whom? Where is her sister buried? Were they close? He was “born in 1881.” How old was he when he came to America? Whom did he leave behind in Europe?

Not finding these answers on my loved one’s gravestones, I turn from the cemetery map in my hand to the map of Jewish mourning that each of us carries in our mind. “Step five: place a stone on your loved one’s grave.” The Book of Ecclesiastes, which we read on Sukkot, teaches that “there is a time for every experience under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die… a time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones” (3:1-5). Visiting the cemetery is the time for gathering stones. We search the cracks in the pavement and sift through the dirt looking for something solid -- a rock or a pebble -- something firm that won’t crumble dust. We do this, we are taught, because rocks, unlike flowers, never die. Our loved one may be gone, but our memory of them is enduring.

This ritual provides only a rather cold comfort. A stone, after all, has no life, no warmth of its own. When we say that a person has a “heart of stone,” it means that that person is unfeeling. And yet, at the cemetery, it is precisely feeling that we seek. The ritual of placing a stone requires us to reverse that familiar phrase: not to leave with a heart of stone, but rather, to leave a stone that is filled with heart. We gather stones and imbue them with that all our heart has to offer: all our yearning, all our love, all our regret, all our loneliness. Stones, we find, can carry the burden. They are strong, heavy, weighty -- like grief.

This is loss: a map that requires many detours, the disappointment of one-way streets, the cold comfort of stone. Our maps our insufficient. Our rituals do too little. And this is why we observe our Yizkor ritual. This is why we remember. Because it is only through memory that we can ever look backwards down a one way street. It is only through memory that we can give what is cold as stone the life and warmth of vitality of life. Memory is no map -- it has no clear pathways, no obvious grid, no step-by-step instructions. It is a messy business, cloudy with forgetfulness, inflated with legend, winding and curving, not straight. It is, by its very nature, full of detours.

And yet, our memory -- and also, we hope, our God -- are indeed something like that cemetery clerk. They hold an eternal record of the people we’ve loved and lost. All we must do is knock on the door and say, “I’m looking for someone.”