Towards A
New Etiquette

Jews mourn as a community,
says Harriet Sarnoff Schiff. "The
idea is to come together, at least
ten of us. Grieving should never be
a private affair or an individual af-
fair."
In her two books — The Be-
reaved Parent and Living Through
Mourning — Schiff, a Beverly Hills
resident, probes and maps the
landscape of bereavement, experi-
ences shared by us all.
As an extension of her work,
Schiff has established bereavement
support groups for survivors around
the country. She finds a precedent
for these groups in Jewish tradi-
tion.
"Support groups are an out-
growth of our shivah. The sense of
coming together is basically a
Jewish concept. It's the idea of a
minyan. We don't like the idea of a
person saying Kaddish alone."
The mobility and fragmenta-
tion of American society has
created an urgent need for innova-
tions like her support groups, she
believes.
"Dislocation is creating a des-
perate need for a new type of fam-
ily. Support groups are beginning
to fill that need."
In Detroit, Schiff set up a sup-
port group at Temple Israel. While
her other groups generally main-
tain a loose structure, the Temple
Israel group follows a prescribed
format, with a different topic dis-
cussed at each session.
She says the format works be-
cause "when people know there's a
format, they don't want to miss
what's going to happen. People
rarely drop out in the middle."
Each facilitator, the group's
"leader," has suffered a significant
loss, according to Schiff. "They are
people who have lived and gone
through a lot of pain."
Schiff began her odyssey after
the death of her ten-year-old son
Robby during heart surgery in
1968. Her own experiences are the
foundation of her work.
Grieving, she says, does not
work "according to a clock. It took
me years before I was ready to
begin my first work on bereave-
ment."
For her latest book, Living
Through Mourning – Finding Com-
fort and Hope When A Loved One
Has Died, published this year by
Viking, Schiff interviewed hun-
dreds of people in order to present
the' experience of bereavement from
`iidriou§ 'points 'of • view. The first

Harriet Sarnoff Schiff:
Support groups are an
outgrowth of the Shivah.

part of the book deals with be-
reaved parents, widows, widowers,
children, siblings and friends.
Schiff emphasizes the special situa-
tion of the latter two groups:

"People forget about children
as mourners. I never came across a
sister or brother (of a child who
died) who felt their parents had
treated them well." The surviving
children are often kept away from
the "ugly reality" of death, she ex-
plains, and their very real feelings
are not taken into account by their
grieving parents.
Friends are usually unrecog-
nized as mourners, she adds. "You
can have a friend closer to you
than a brother, but at the funeral
you will be a support system and
not recognized as a mourner.
"I think we have to re-examine
who the mourners are," she states.
The second section of Living
Through Mourning takes the
reader down the "road to healing,"
through the stages, or "pathways,"
of mourning: sorrow, denial, anger,
guilt, depression, powerlessness
and, finally, acceptance. These
stages, Schiff emphasizes, will be
experienced differently by every
individual.
A chapter on "faith" has been
slipped in just before the -chapter
on "acceptance." -
Questions such as "What kind

C'

of God can let a young child die?
What kind of God can let a mother
die before she can see her children
married or a father before he can
see his children graduate?" are
asked by many, Schiff says.
"It's so appalling to think that,
at random, something happens.
People who believe that perhaps
there is a plan are a little more for-
tunate. People who don't may have
to dig a little deeper before they
reach acceptance."
The book's third section deals
with support groups.
Schiff calls for "a whole new
etiquette" to deal with the realities
of life today, realities such as di-
vorce.
A divorced man may remarry,
Schiff says by way of example.
When his child dies, he feels he has
the right to mourn in the child's
house. The child's mother may not
want the man's new wife around.
"It may be better to close the
family room and just use the
chapel," she suggests as a way to
get everyone on neutral ground.
Schiff calls for truthfulness,
not idealization, in funeral
eulogies. "It's unhealthy to take
Robby and turn him into a tzaddik.
We all have flaws. The rabbi tells
us that mother is perfect. The
daughter thinks, can never be a
mother like that.' The son thinks,
can never find someone that good
to marry.' "
If it is too difficult to give a
"balanced" picture of the deceased,
Schiff suggests using biblical
stories that relate archetypically to
the one being mourned. The Schiff
loss was compared to the story of
the death of King David and
Bathsheba's first child.
While the infant lay dying,
David wept, fasted and lay all
night upon the ground. When he
received word that the child had
died, the king arose and ate.
His servants were puzzled.
Why did the king fast while the
child was alive and eat after he
had died?
David answered: "While the
child was still alive I said, Who
can yet tell if God will be gracious
and let him live?' But now that he
is dead, why should I fast? Can I
bring him back again? I shall go to
him, but he shall not return to
me."
"The story had so much more
significance for us," Schiff explains,
"A rabbi could pick things like
that.' ❑

the casket," he says. "And there was
no viewing the body. That's a new
shtick."
Both funeral homes offer a sur-
prising variety of caskets, from the
modest box made out of pressed
board and covered in grey cloth, and
the traditional plain wood casket, to
coffins of polished mahogany. -
People buy an expensive coffin
for the same reason they buy an ex-
pensive car, Techner suggests. "They
want the best and they can afford
it."

dam and Eve learned the art of
burial, the Midrash tells us,
from a raven who showed them
how to bury the body of their dead
son Abel, by scratching away at the
earth where it had interred one of
its own kind.
The clear shift in emphasis from
the dead to the living occurs at the
burial. The funeral and mourning
processes are "psychologically very
intense at the beginning, and
gradually you come out of it," ex-
plains Hebrew Memorial's Hoc-
hheiser.
The traditional Jewish funeral
"integrates" the mourner into the
reality of the situation, says Rabbi
Elimelech Goldberg of Young Israel
of Southfield. "Not to resolve it im-
mediately, but to grow with it."
The ancient demonstration of
grief is the keriah, the rending of the
garment for a spouse, parent, child
or sibling. "As clothing covers the
body, so does the body garb the
soul," Rabbi Levin comments. Rend-
ing one's clothing over the heart,
then, symbolizes the freeing of the
soul from its earthly fetters, in addi-
tion to manifesting the loss of a
loved one.
Keriah has a long tradition.
When his sons carried in Joseph's
blood-stained coat, Jacob "rent his
garments." In his grief over the loss
of his children, Job "stood up and
rent his mantle."
"I seldom see, outside of -Or-
thodox circles, the rending of the
garments," comments Rabbi Schnip-
per.
The keriah, that cathartic act of
pure grief, has been largely replaced
by a black pin with a ribbon that
has been symbolically cut. The pin,
worn by mourners on their clothing
is "totally non-Jewish," Rabbi
Schnipper goes on to say.
Funerals are not held on Shab-
bat, Yom Kippur or on the first day
of a festival. Escorting the dead is
considered a great mitzvah and, in
earlier times, the whole community
would stop work and attend a fun-
eral. The minimum duty is to rise as
the funeral train passes and accom-
pany it four paces.
Traditionally, the casket is low-
ered into the ground and the grave
is filled by those attending the fun-
eral. Until that moment, the de-
ceased is "hanging in limbo," says
Hochheiser. The body has now come
to its final rest, and it is at this
point where the needs of the dead
and the living intertwine and part.
"There is a sense of finality for
those who stay for the burial," Hoc-
hheiser believes. While not made
any more un.derstandable, the death
becomes _"more concrete. And. :that,

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