Forty-one years ago this coming week, I walked with sleepless eyes and a weary heart to the front door of my childhood home, where an unexpected visitor had just shown up for my mother’s shiva. If I recall correctly, he was wearing faded jeans, a denim jacket and hippie work boots —his usual outfit — and black hair fell like a curtain down to his shoulders. He exuded a kind of sullen charisma that I envied, and that marked us, at least superficially, as very different members of New Jersey’s Highland Park High School, class of 1973.
My mother had died of breast cancer at the age of 50 on Kislev 17, which was December 1 in 1974 and falls on November 29 this year. In our slapdash, secular way, my family began sitting shiva even before her funeral. Not only did we violate Judaism’s injunction to bury the dead within 24 hours, a rule none of us even knew, but my mother’s written instructions called for cremation, a posthumous affront to the Orthodox mother she despised.
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