We could scarcely imagine ourselves as parents, let alone mourning the loss of a parent.
“Hey Siri, what do you wear to a Jewish funeral?”
Rustling through my wardrobe, I think of the funerals I have attended, many on behalf of patients. Hindu funerals amid a sea of white. Calming Buddhist chants. Sikh prayers at the Gurudwara. A Catholic mass. Funerals with standing room only and an Orthodox one with an audience of three: the priest, social worker and me. A Polish mass conducted entirely in Polish lasting three hours, an exercise in discipline.
But my first Jewish funeral to farewell the father of my friend feels too close to home.
I met her in medical school and we studied together every weekend to become specialists.
Many friendships would falter amid the subsequent juggle but we persevered through a deceptively simple formula. For 25 years, we have met at the same walking track, alone, then with single and double prams, and lately by ourselves again. Our conversations touched on sleep, school and sports, then the dilemmas around devices, dating and vaping interspersed with our own news. Whatever the issue, the walking track grounded us in perspective and consolation.
And suddenly, we came of an age when our parents got older and developed some of the problems of our patients. Worrisome predictions turned into actual events and the inevitable reckoning with the healthcare leviathan turned us from confident doctors into fretful relatives.
Of all our parents, her dad was the most effusive. He liked me but was especially fond of my children. Spotting us at family events, he would open the arms that revealed an open heart.
It’s one thing to have your own parents dote on your children but it’s something special to watch others do it. So, when I discovered that he had cancer, I was gutted.
For obvious reasons, I was not his oncologist, but I helped my friend as she gracefully fulfilled the duties of daughter, doctor, nurse and adviser. Every day I see age and illness conspire against people but his decline still felt like rapid motion. He went from diagnosis to treatment to hospital all before we could get our heads around it.
One evening my phone rings. Dad is going to hospice, my friend says. Hospice beds are so scarce that they mostly admit actively dying patients. She is crying and I am crying: how has the end arrived so unceremoniously?
I offer to drive over, and she says don’t rush. I wonder whether that’s code for don’t come at all but she is just sparing me the heartache.
But how can I not close the loop? Steadying myself, I drive to hospice but as I park, the family arrives. Knowing my place, I leave.
The next day, after distributing bad news to my own patients, I return. The clerk asks for a relationship. How to neatly encompass all the folds of mutual fondness?
Visitor, I say.
I find him in a sunlit room wearing the same beam on a thin face.
“You came!” he exclaims with obvious delight.
Putting my strong hand into his weak, I pretend this encounter is no different to all the others. He describes his symptoms; I say they are treatable. He complains about the food; I suggest we order takeaway. He wants to walk; I proclaim it a fine idea.
I know this role inside out, being doctor to a patient. It feels like pushing food around your plate when you don’t want to eat.
And then it comes.
“I don’t know why this is happening,” he puzzles.
At some level, everyone grapples with this existential question. My patients confronting premature death ask why now. Those who can’t die soon enough ask why not now.
“The thing is,” he bargains as if I am the adjudicator, “My grandkids still need me.”
His metaphor for the fear of being forgotten is a common fear and I respond how I might to my own parents.
“The grandchildren will be sad but OK because you have given them strong values. You can let go.” I don’t like myself for saying it but he is either satisfied or very tired.
Before I leave, he lingers on a photo of my children and tells me he loves them.
When my friend asks how long he might have, I estimate a week or two. So much for prognosticating. Two days later, he dies.
The Jewish funeral is as swift as his demise.
My daughter and I sit separated by a screen from her brothers who remember to wear a yarmulke from our synagogue visits in happier times. The rabbi delivers an efficient tribute, there are no images or eulogies, and we are out in the open.
A brisk prayer and a husband, father and friend to many is laid to rest underneath a mound of fresh earth. The remembrances will come when the family sits Shiva.
Before we head back, my friend generously tells my children that I have been a steady friend. This has me hoping that among their Instagram friends they will also find those who will accompany them on the twists and turns of life.
When my friend and I met, we were brimming with the special optimism of youth. Opportunity and discovery waited at every corner. We could scarcely picture ourselves as doctors, let alone parents and then, one day mourning the death of a parent.
In his memoir called Experience, Martin Amis reflects on the “ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters” of real life. For 25 years, the miracles have tumbled in: graduation, birth, wedding, first job, first car, first home and first pet.
Among the things we never thought to discuss was how we might cope with a parent’s death and what to wear to a Jewish funeral.
But if there is a season for everything, the next 25 years are bound to contain the rituals of sadness requiring new ways of being a friend. I tell myself that if undeterred by our losses, we keep showing up at the track, we will walk our way through the worst.
• Ranjana Srivastava is an Australian oncologist, award-winning author and Fulbright scholar. Her latest book is called A Better Death
