The Burial of the Dead

Part 1: Finding a Plot

Marc Chagall, Gates of The Cemetery (1917). Oil on paint.

Lisbon’s only Jewish cemetery sits along a curve in a slope that forms the bottom of one hill and the top of another. About a half-kilometer up the slope is the unmistakable white stone esplanade leading to the arched portico and rococo drip-castle chapel of the city’s largest Christian burial ground, the cemetery of São João. If you set out from there, driving or walking quickly down the long, winding street, punctuated by glints and glimpses of river in the gaps between the buildings, you’d shoot right past the Jewish cemetery without noticing. The entrance is practically unmarked and meant to be unremarkable: metal doors painted dark green with a pair of embossed magen david set into a wall of gray stone and mortar. In response to recent events elsewhere in Europe and the Levant, a discreet roll of razor-wire has been added just behind some new fencing above the lowest part of the wall.

I’ve gone twice through the green door from the street this past year, each time for the funeral of a complete stranger. I’d been asked to attend as a designated mourner to help make up the group of ten Jewish men necessary for the ritual to be considered consecrated according to Jewish law. The funerals were tersely practical. Their simplicity often left me—in a literal sense— astonished.

The body is ritually washed in a room just inside the cemetery wall fitted for this purpose, wrapped in an unembroidered white cerement, and laid out on a bier that’s wheeled into an adjoining bare, white-washed room with low wooden benches and a few cushions for comfort set along two of the walls. The mourners gather here, and the rabbi invites family members along with anyone else to share some thoughts about the deceased, if they’re so moved. Then, the bier borne in front, the rabbi closely following and the mourners trailing, sometimes in silence, sometimes with a chanted psalm that I didn’t recognize, we process downslope through rows of flat slabs and sun-bleached white headstones no higher than a couple hands, after the fashion of Moroccan graveyards, to the open gravesite next to a mound of prepared earth, amid barrows, shovels and pickaxes, and once even a length of garden hose.

There, several strong men lower the body with the aid of ropes; the mourners are invited to fill the grave, three shovelfuls each, a spade provided for the old and infirm who approach the pit on the arms of relatives or of the stout grave diggers. Any surviving direct male descendants may stand in the grave itself to perform the initial shoveling. When the grave has been filled, a metal lid is affixed over the place where another long flat stone will appear in a year’s time. According to custom, the mourners place smaller rocks on or around the grave from a basket of pebbles assembled for this purpose. Everything is stone and earth and stone and more stone, whirled round in earth’s diurnal course. We all then return to the white-washed room inside the grange, where kaddish is said by the rabbi, the family, and the minyan, if needed, and individual condolences may subsequently be extended.

Offering condolences to a complete stranger who you have just witnessed crying, or bowed in grief, halting of speech, choking on words—especially when the whole thing happens in one or several foreign languages—is both awkward and, it turns out, surprisingly simple, about as basic and fundamental an exchange of sympathy between humans as possible on this planet. You are face to face with someone’s wholly separate grief, visceral and real. You make eye contact and say the ritual words—”sorry for your loss,” or “I grieve for your loss,” and receive a no less formulaic but also sincere, “Thank you for coming.” Rituals are containers that permit emotions to well-up in potable form: You can draw from the well without drowning in it.

On both occasions, I find that I’ve been crying at some point in the ceremony, thankfully not while shaking hands or speaking with the actual bereaved. The tears are compounds: mixing memory and desire—you might say—or sorrow and self-pity. At the first burial, I realized the last physical memory I had of shoveling earth on a grave was at my father’s funeral, when I was nineteen. I must also have done so at my grandfather’s funeral and my grandmother’s, a year apart, when I was in my mid-twenties, but my father’s funeral is the one that stuck with me, perhaps because it was such a lonely event: no rabbi, no friends, just my mother, my father’s sister and her husband, and me, wordless and uncomforted. The earth chunked on the coffin lid.

In Lisbon there are almost always birds in all seasons. Though the cemetery has only a few olive trees around the entrance and at the edges, you can hear snatches of birdsong and find splashes of color in the little gardens of the cottage-style houses on the other side of back wall. Laundry hangs drying from the balconies from a row of of a large multistory apartment that shares a wall with the cemetery at its narrowest point to the southwest: sheets, towels, underwear. I take comfort in this proximity between living and dead. Maybe if my father had been buried somewhere like this—a small city of the dead inside the city, down the street from a good Indian restaurant and a kilometer from the exquisite national tile museum—instead of near exit 12 on the Saw Mill River Parkway, I might have visited his grave more than four times in thirty-three years.

Or maybe not. It’s not as if the United States has a great culture of spending time communing with one’s dead relatives and friends, bringing picnics to the gravesite, celebrating birthdays with grandma by her plot. Neither, really, do Jews. Although halachic law insists on burial, commemorations mostly happen through prayer at the synagogue and at the yearly record of the body’s passage, in the form of a candle. Still, I have the pagan thought that, even in death, I’d like to be surrounded by attractions, beauty, places and people, tastes and sounds of interest to the living.

Before the Jewish cemetery in Lisbon, I had an even more outlandish fantasy about wanting to be buried under a lone olive tree just outside an orange grove in a hillside town close to Spain’s eastern coast, in the province of Alicante. I’d been staying there for a couple months, a few years back, and had come across the spot while out on a walk:

It didn’t matter to me that most countries have laws against burying human remains in the equivalent of backyards. I went as far as asking around the village about who owned the land. It didn’t matter that it was private and not for sale. I fantasized about how I might persuade the two brothers, cunning and tough farmers, by all accounts, to sell me the spot under that exact tree with the view of the granite cliffs and the Mediterranean glinting in the distance. It felt right.

I’m now about to turn fifty-two. At that age, my father had only a year and four months to live, and they were not a good year and four months. Whenever I think about this, which is whenever something or someone reminds me of my age—it can even be the lengthening light of spring and the evening glow it now brings to the back wall of my kitchen—I feel terrifically unprepared for my death. I don’t mean this in an existential sense, nor do I mean that the secular world of my childhood and the posthumanist, socially attenuated world of my adulthood has left me without resources to conceive my end—although all that’s there too. Primarily this onrush of unpreparedness comes at me in the form of a to-do list, as if I have to prepare my taxes or turn in an assignment on deadline: I really need to make a will; I should find a literary executor who will ensure my posthumous fame, a thought that seems both absurd and practical; and I need to buy a burial plot and plan a funeral.

I like imagining my funeral, at least at first: all my friends who, anyway, I almost never see anymore, maybe my cousins, the exes who still speak to me and maybe even some who don’t, favorite former students, my daughter and her future children. I tend to leave my mother out of these fantasies, not wanting—for her sake—to have predeceased her and given her more grief. The Spanish hillside funeral particularly appealed to me, like the destination wedding I’d never have. Maybe there’d be drinking and someone would pour a libation of good rioja from a clay jar into the earth. But then, as with any party I’ve thrown, there’s a counter-fantasy “What if no one comes?” What if no one can be bothered? What if I end up an anonymous corpse, marked for cremation?

So I texted my friend from the synagogue, the one who’d asked me to help make up the minyan, to inquire how to get a plot in the cemetery here. At least I’d have ten random Jewish men at my internment; it would be a mitzvah for them.

“Everything okay?” he replied.

This is usually what happens to me when I mention thoughts concerning death to my friends, or sometimes an attempted joke.

“I’m fine,” I said, “I just want to know how to get a plot.”

This was, in fact, only partially true. At the time I reached out to my friend, I was suffering from one of those minor embarrassing middle-age afflictions or, you know, it could be CANCER. Something about being the son of a doctor who also happened to die painfully of a then-untreatable disease has skewed my views of the “care of the self” toward the Foucauldian, or perhaps just the stoical: the clinic is unhelpful at best, and once you end up there it’s probably too late. Everything else is minor until it’s not and will get better with time, home remedies, and over-the-counter drugstore medication while you continue to live your own best life.

Of course I might have turned out differently, overidentifying with my father through his illness and contracting a lifelong case of hypochondriasis. But for that to have worked, I would also have needed access to more affordable and efficient health care plans than what has been on offer in the United States throughout my adult life. So, since my last check up was a little over 25 years ago now, it made a certain internal sense that instead of scheduling a biopsy with Portugal’s public health system, I should put my energy in this uncertain interregnum between malignancy or benignity into immediately planning my funeral.

My friend texted back, “Morbid, but I can help if it’s for you.” He told me that a burial plot and stone cost 3000 euros, and I would also have to become an official dues paying member of the “Comunidad Israelita de Lisboa” as its known here, a step I’d so far resisted for unclear reasons perhaps related to my inability to make a doctor’s appointment.

I did not immediately join the community this time either, nor did I shell out for the burial plot. Instead, I decided to take myself for a long weekend in the Douro valley countryside, in Portugal’s north, where I’d never been. Here was a happier undiscovered country. It was the weekend before Pesah and Easter and the land up there was already in full flower—cherries, lilacs, a resplendent Japanese camellia tree—something I didn’t even know was possible, weren’t camellias a bush?—and everywhere the almost painful bright green of young leaves.

I’d brought some psilocybin friends with me, intending to enjoy the heightened feeling of communion (or just community) with nature that their company often brings. Once I arrived in this already full natural glory, however, I hesitated. My experience with this particular batch—and with psychedelics generally—was that they tended to heighten whatever underlying emotions I was most trying to check at the moment.

I held a desiccated mushroom and examined its gnarled stem, the blue and greenish tinge under the cap. I thought about eating it. “You, my friend,” it said, “are afraid of dying.”

“Oh fuck,” I was afraid of dying, like anyone else. I was unlikely to be “better at it,” than my father had been. If I ate this now, I would get a large dose of this fear of death, no mistake, and maybe, maybe something at the other end, the reconciliation with the universe that the burgeoning literature on psychedelics often speaks about, but maybe not. Did I want that? No, I was here to enjoy myself, check out the local sites, and work on rewrites for an essay my friend wanted to translate into Portuguese for the magazine she edits here. Life, life, a new life or the same one! There would still be time to reckon with the imminence and inevitability of the end. I put the mushroom back in its bag.

Night fell and I was wrapped in an almost perfect silence. No creak of timber from the restored wooden roof of my cottage; the evenings were still too cold for the frogs I’d heard earlier in the pools and ponds around this old farm that had been converted into eco-tourist lodges. I wasn’t afraid of the silence, but I was still afraid of dying.

One of the few people who tolerates my human fears and foibles, or at least takes them seriously—although now at a much greater distance—is my former wife of twelve years. Not the next morning, nor the following, but only late in the day, after I returned to Lisbon, I texted her about my awareness of the fear of death that had been keeping me silent company for a while.

She replied almost immediately, “Yup. Some part of you has come to the end of its life/role/usefulness... The question is do you have the capacity, this time around, to feel the fear.”

Of course she was right, and her invitation to psychologize and reflect was another nice way for me to avoid any anxiety about not having scheduled a biopsy: Keenest fear is often a fear of something that has already happened to us. Fear is memory disguised and the fear also protects us from the memory. We are less afraid of the unknown than afraid of what we already know, beneath consciousness. But which part of me had already come to an end? There were almost too many possibilities in the last two years: I’d become an emigrant with all the changes in status and familiarity that entailed; the sense of myself that I’d carried in my thirties and forties—of someone who could, through my editing work and my criticism, through the exercise of my judgment and taste, bring about some change for the good in American literature and culture—maybe even its politics—was gone; even for myself, I’d abandoned whatever residual ambitions I might have had in the rat race of contemporary American authorship and literary life; I wasn’t even competing for prizes or writers’ residencies or even really for attention; mostly, I wrote for a magazine that a majority of my former readers and some of my once closest friends refused to read on principle; people who once sought my opinion or advice never even called to say hello or inquire about my health; for some time already I hadn’t been an active parent; my sex drive and erotic imagination were so diminished I might as well have been taking SSRIs; I spent a lot of time talking to a cat; I was living for nothing now and keeping some kind of record.

Of all the various possible dead, or superseded, or vestigial aspects of my self that my former wife’s remark suggested to me, one in particular did float to mind like a camellia in a pool. It was related to my writing, or my sense of self-as-writer. I’d already been noticing the change, but, as is customary with me, I’d registered it as guilt, as a failure. The change is evident even in this essay, as I wrote it, in the shift from mourning for strangers to mourning for parents to foreseeing and mourning one’s own death, and it will be the subject of the second part of this essay, to be continued.

—Marco Roth