When someone near and dear dies you need a bit of comfort. At the very least. Even if its a very very old person who no-one could work out how they’d lived so long in the first place. It doesn’t matter. Someone loved and cherished is no longer with us; send in the hugs. All cultures do it and have done since 10,000 BC when Raquel Welch’s husband got mauled by a sabre-toothed tiger and barely made it back to the cave in his blood-soaked loin cloth before passing forth unto the next world. The mechanics of mourning vary but in essence its just about routines, rituals, customs which have evolved to soften the blow. Not make it go away. Not pretend it didn’t happen. For those you need a Ouija board or some vile and exploitative chancer who has ‘heaven’ on speed-dial. But just to soften the blow and enable acceptance. That’s what we all need.

For Jews it is a wonderful and slick process. Probably because its the one I’m so familiar with. But also because it involves a lot of eating. Mainly cakes. Danish pastries. Rugele. Biscuits. A lot of eating. Someone has died: take food! Which is similar but not identical to ‘a child’s been born: take food’ or even ‘nothing’s happened: take food!’

So my lovely old dad was buried on Friday, 42 hours after his final breath. Not a record but another stellar performance. And then we enter ‘shiva’. Which is Hebrew for ‘seven’. As, traditionally, the immediate mourners sit in low chairs for 7 days and everyone comes to visit them, bring Danish, offer comfort and then you say prayers in the evening to remind God to look after the Newbie. But we opted to ‘sit shiva’ for just four days, which ended last night. And due to the weather, we decided to have the wonderfully cross-cultural-sounding: shiva al-fresco. Which is a bit like a 2-day garden party, but with prayers.

And everyone comes to pay their respects and offer words of comfort, of love, of anything of a nice nature. People my dad owed money to, or had really wronged badly, stayed away. Though I don’t think there were any. And if there were: fuck ‘em, they would have deserved it. And its cross generational with our friends and family, the girls’, and a few of my dad’s mates, really really old ones, who’d made the long trek to do the right thing. It is, in short, quite lovely. We bought 100 bottles of water and over the two evenings, most went. And some of the whisky, as its traditional at such times to offer a ‘l’chaim’, which means ‘to life’ and you need no further explanation than that.

And then, just as it was all ending and people were drifting away, a truly amazing thing happened. After 6 weeks of drought, it started to rain. And I just wondered if that was my dad’s final joke? Or if God was so pleased with the New Boy that he rewarded us. Either way, its good.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx