Looking in the mirror

Jewish rituals surrounding mourning are incredibly complex. There's a rule for everything, for every moment, for every place, even for the clothes you wear.

It may seem overwhelming, and on a certain level it certainly is. But at the same time it's somewhat comforting to know that there's a given structure or cadence to the process, that over the centuries successive generations of folks far wiser than I'll ever hope to be have pondered the matter and applied as close to a logical framework as one can add to the illogical process of death and irreplaceable loss.

I could start an entirely new blog just on the topic alone, spend the rest of my life writing about it, and still not even scratch the surface. But I'd like to touch on an interesting snippet that seems to have stuck with me as we've moved, foggily, through these past few difficult weeks. It revolves around mirrors.

The basic tradition is a simple one: no mirrors in a Jewish house of mourning. You're not supposed to be able to look at yourself, so every mirror is covered up - either with smudged on stuff or taped-on paper or some other substance. My in-laws' place, festooned as it was with mirrors by the previous owner, presented an especially significant challenge, and I think more than a couple of trees were felled to make the paper and masking tape needed to cover all of them.

The sliding door near the front door presented a bit of a challenge, as the tape would blow off fairly regularly courtesy of a breeze that blew in from the hallway every time someone opened the door. I quickly learned to keep my ear attuned to the telltale sound of flapping paper, and I always seemed to know where my roll of masking tape was so that I could quickly retape the offending corner and once again cover up the glass. As the week of shiva wore on and we spent day after day having countless friends and family coming through the house, I became ever more comfortable walking away from conversations to take care of it.

I'll share more about the whole walking away from folks thing in another blog entry. But for now, I simply wanted to share another slice of this surreal journey. Because as trivial as covering up errantly exposed mirrors may seem, in retrospect I realize how important it was to hold onto rituals as a means of making sense of something that'll never make any sense at all.