Halfway through the “Death Café” my leg started shaking—tremors so slight I couldn’t see them, but strong enough that when I put my hand on my thigh I could feel that I was shivering, as if in fear. Which was weird, because I was actually having a lot of fun.

I had not begun the day planning to spend one of the final evenings before the Day of Atonement sitting in an anarchist feminist bookstore and talking about death with a circle with strangers, but the chance seemed too seasonally appropriate to pass up.

“Death Cafe is a place to wonder together about the mystery and meaning of life and to discuss death comfortably and openly,” according to the Bluestockings’ website. (Bluestocking has repeatedly hosted one of the city’s multiple unaffiliated Death Cafés, but was not involved in organizing this particular event.)  Originating in London in 2011, these gatherings respond to what planners and participants see as an unhealthy silence around the subject of mortality in daily life. We all know we are going to die someday, so why not admit to that awareness, and talk about our feelings on the matter?

Organizers describe the result as a “free-wheeling, self-facilitated conversation around death and dying, inevitably touching upon life and living.”

The Jewish calendar, too, knows living and dying are inextricably linked. On Rosh Hashana we celebrate the New Year by eating round foods and looking forward with friends and family to the year to come… and by reciting all the possible ways we might die before it is complete. “Who by water, who by fire?” the chazan chants as we look furtively round the sanctuary.

And then just ten days later we are back, pleading to be be written in the book of life—but also declaring our acceptance of whatever fate the year holds.

That kind of acceptance—of our bodies’ mortality, of a certain lack of control over our own continuation—is something I struggle to achieve. Even as I say the words, my mind can’t quite believe that I could really (ever!) die.

And so the Death Café sounded like a good chance to practice putting myself in the mindset of acceptance.

The format of the café is simple. We were broken up into small groups, and asked to share our names and what had brought us there. My group included a woman who’d spent time at a Zen monastery and was interested in hospice work, a young hospital doctor looking to engage more fully with the deaths of patients, and a teenager in ripped jeans who described how losing a family member to suicide at a young age had changed her worldview.

In plastic chairs surrounded by books about urban planning and DIY radicalism, we asked each other increasingly personal questions.  Whether we really believed in a self, what kinds of burials we wanted for our bodies. Which, we imagined, might upset us more at the moment of death—the sorrow of leaving loved ones, or the fear of the unknown?

In the calm, cookie-and-tea fueled atmosphere, words poured forth from all of us. Throughout the evening, snippets of other circles’ conversations, equally compelling, were audible. There was so much to talk about, and, as we repeatedly acknowledged, who knew how much time we had to talk about it? Yet somehow the quality of the conversation remained unrushed.

One death café veteran in our group described the feeling of “having your head opened” that these conversations give her, and I could understand what she meant. Admitting that we are going to die one day—really thinking about it—is taboo, is downright scary.

But it is also necessary and important. On Yom Kippur, our petitions to be written in the Book of Life act as an additional wake-up call, a push to do teshuvah and change our ways for the better. And while many justifiably find the “sin=death” correlation this implies troubling, the reminder that we are mortal is indeed a powerful impetus for living well.

The organizers of the particular Death Café I attended say their inspiration to hold it came out of a conversation between friends about what a “good death” might mean—and that although they were still looking for the answer, they were sure that part of it was a living a life in which you treat others well. By thinking forward to the end, we can perhaps pull back a little, look at the larger patterns in our behavior, do better.

Every year in my parent’s synagogue, we read a text that describes Yom Kippur as just that kind of practice.

“One year. Give me one more year. I’m not finished. Not yet. We’re afraid. We don’t want to die. But Yom Kippur is about dying. We enact the drama of our dying. We put on our kittels. We stop eating. It’s over. How do I let go of this life? How I forgive everything, everyone, myself, and let my life fall… Give up your little story. Give up your small self.”

At my parents’ synagogue, since I was a child, we’ve read that text just before the Aleinu. I kept thinking of it as I sat in my circle of strangers, nibbling on a cookie. When I got home, I looked it up. The author, Bruce Fertman, describes the full prostration as another kind practice death, a surrender.

But it doesn’t stop there:

“Bowing is not just about about giving up and going down. It’s about giving up and going down in order to get back up. All the way up. Up, more easily and further than you have ever been. Up, with fresh energy, power, openness. Up, with renewed purpose…From where does our strength come? Our strength comes from God. But sometimes we’ve got to go down to get it. We rise with strength renewed.”

Wishing you a good practice death, and a good renewal and rebirth. Gmar chatima tova.

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As we previously established, terrible things happen to the Jewish community on Tisha B’Av, and while it’s not quite on the scale of the destruction of the Temple, yesterday was no exception when we lost actor Fyvush Finkel. The Emmy winner, who was almost 94, was known in secular roles as a character actor, but he was also arguably the last bastion of Yiddish theatre from, if not its heyday, when it existed far more prevalently in the Jewish community than today.

Amongst Finkel’s many accolades, he has a star bearing his name on the Yiddish Walk of Fame, so I decided to make pilgrimage.

The Walk of Fame sits at 10th Street and 2nd Avenue, at the site of what was then the 2nd Avenue Deli. It dates to 1985, even then somewhat of a memorial (Molly Picon was still alive, then, for example, but her husband Jacob Kalich was gone, for another, and theatrical patriarch Abraham Goldfaden died in 1908).

Eventually, the deli moved uptown, and a compromise was struck: No one would tear up the stars laid into the sidewalk, but no one would maintain them, either. Since then, they’ve gradually fallen into disrepair, the names wearing away beneath the feet of passersby. The storefront they sit in front of is currently a bank. I have visited this spot many times, going a bit out of my way to pop over whenever I’m on St. Marks or in Alphabet City. Although I know the occasional historical walking tour points it out, not once have I seen anyone so much as look down as they walk over it.

Today, alas, was no exception. I thought of leaving something on his star, like a flower, or in vein with Jewish tradition, a stone. But his star was one of the top ones (and one of the only ones unshared with any other names), and right by the entrance to the bank.

This did make the wheels in my head start turning, so keep an eye out for tomorrow’s post, where I finally make a definitive list of who’s on the Walk (I couldn’t find one anywhere else), and try to conclude if Finkel was the final survivor.  In the meantime, I leave you first with this tweet:

[WHIP PAN TO]: Hairless intubated human form suspended in goo. Tub signage: NUTRIENT BATH #6.
VO: Sixush Finkel. It is your time. ARISE.

— Glen Weldon (@ghweldon) August 14, 2016

Finkel worked up until the end, and so I also leave you with a clip from one of his final (Yiddish) roles: A shtetl dweller who may or may not be a dybbuk (IMDB actually lists the part as “Dybbuk?”) in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man:

Images: Fyvush Finkel in A Serious Man. Via YouTube. Other images by Gabriela Geselowitz.

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The terribly sad news of Robin Williams’ death led me—and probably you, too—down the bittersweet memory lane of YouTube this afternoon. Here’s a hilarious clip I’d never seen before (though aficionados will no doubt know it), in which Williams riffs on Jesus’ Jewishness. Enjoy.

People say to me Jesus wasn’t Jewish. Of course he was Jewish! Thirty years old, single, living at home with his parents, come on! Working in his father’s business, his mother thought he was God’s gift — he’s Jewish! Give it up!

(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

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Death, then deluge: I couldn’t stop thinking about this while reading cartoonist Roz Chast‘s new memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? An intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis, it closely documents the decline and eventual deaths of Chast’s elderly parents—and it’s not pretty. As any dutiful daughter knows, you are definitely not allowed to write about your parents until they are no longer of this world. And if you have siblings, probably not even then. Chast, however, is an only child, and she here she presents a loving but unsparing examination of her parents, and herself.

The story is told through a combination of comics, handwritten pages, photos, and sketches. Chast’s style is harried, and drawings rarely seem drafted, perfectly channeling both the anxiety of living the events described, and the urgency of wanting to record all of it. The photos show up unexpectedly, and to great effect. Pages describing her hoarding parents’ apartment are followed by stark images of rooms filled with piles of browning and greying stuff, the decrepitude highlighted by the flash-photograph.

Visually, comics can get you to a place that feels, somehow, closer to the truth. People who draw their experiences are attempting to document everything as precisely as possible: this is what was said; this is what everyone was wearing; this is what the weather was like on that day. Chast is deeply observant, and a natural storyteller, and the flood of emotion and memory has a remarkable flow. Several comics (and some truly amazing photos of a young, grumpy, cat-eye bespectacled Chast), serve as flashbacks to her childhood, and these stories aren’t merely anecdotal. With the author now caring for her parents, every incident mentioned takes on a new layer of meaning.

Chast has made her name writing jokes on the themes of worry and disappointment, so it’s no surprise that even the funny parts are quite dark. Bizarre Alzheimer’s moments make for amusing stories, as do strange and horrifying incidents at the aged care facility her parents move to. When her mother insists that her (long-deceased) mother-in-law is trying to poison her, or another resident falls off her chair during mealtime, nobody is dismayed. Laughing is coping, because what else can you do? It’s an informative insight into the origin of Chast’s style, and her general philosophy.

Examined more than anything is the author’s relationship with her mother, a stubborn and often unfriendly woman whose New York home ran on fear–of the outside world, money, death, and disease. Mrs. Chast is equally stubborn in dying; she exists suspended between life and death for an extended period of time, and here, more than anywhere else, the trauma of Chast’s unhappy childhood revisits her. She seeks closure and answers, but rarely looks to her mother for comfort; alas, she has never been its source. The painful resolve in wanting to be a better mother than her own is evident here. She worked hard to leave and change, but here she is, back where it all started. These are the things you cannot escape, and this is what they look like.

Waiting with her newly-deceased mother, Chast writes “I didn’t know what do, so I drew her.” A sketch follows. Pages of similar sketches follow; simple pen drawings of her mother’s comatose, slack-jawed face, drawn in the days leading up to her passing. These are not comics. They are dated drawings documenting precisely what the author was looking at: a dying, elderly woman. Death, as usual, demands to be looked at in the eye. Chast tells us that her parents’ “cremains” live in her closet. They are together, they are quiet, and finally, she can contain them. So: death, then deluge, but then maybe peace.

Esther C. Werdiger writes, makes comics, illustrates, podcasts, and lives in New York. You can read her “League of Ordinary Ladies” series here.

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