Free A Remarkable Kindness by Diana Bletter Page B

the circle of life for them. Just think— we’re the very last people to be with them before they’re buried underground.”
    Lauren reluctantly agreed, and the next afternoon, she was surprised during her first tahara in the burial house. Taking careof Ruth Rosen was infinitely easier than trying to take care of a suffering, dying patient.
    Ruth’s body lay covered on the long metal table in the center of the room, her feet facing the door. Gila removed her bandages and hospital tags. Sophie filled a bucket and poured water over Ruth’s head and neck, her right shoulder, arm, hip, leg, foot. Then, another bucket, and water cascaded over Ruth’s left side. Aviva helped Gila and Leah roll Ruth to the side and Sophie poured water down her back.
    It was like a sacred dance, an ancient, hallowed, healing rite. It seemed to Lauren that all of Ruth’s sins were being washed away. All her mistakes, missteps, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities. All the minutes and hours of her life washed away in a few sweeps of water. Even the acrid smell of the dead was washed away.
    (Like a kosher baptism, Lauren would tell David later, for want of a better description. A consecration, before life returned to the foreverness of death.)
    â€œWe make sure to keep the woman modestly covered at all times.” Sophie stood next to Lauren, guiding her through the ritual. “We want to give her the dignity she deserves. We don’t even pass things over her body. It’s still her space.”
    Lauren was fascinated, awestruck, and humbled all at the same time. Helping a woman give birth was so noisy, filled with moans and screams and commotion. But death was quiet. So calm and unruffled. It was almost as if the mystery of life could be found within that silence. It was something Lauren had never experienced before. A holy stillness. Grace, she thought. Grace.

6
October 23, 2002
Lauren
    N ow Sophie reappeared in the garden, the twinkle still in her blue eyes. Could it be, Lauren thought, that being around death all these years had enhanced and deepened Sophie’s joy of life? Sophie stopped in front of Lauren. “When something happens to me—”
    â€œ If something—”
    â€œNo, Lauren.” Sophie bent down to deadhead a dry geranium. “When something happens to me, and you’re doing my tahara— ”
    â€œDon’t talk like that,” Lauren pleaded.
    â€œI want you to have this list of the names of my mother and three sisters,” Sophie said calmly. “I want you to say their names, too, during my tahara, because they were all killed and never—”
    â€œOh, Sophie . . .”
    â€œI told Heinz to engrave their names on my gravestone, too. Soat least they’ll have some kind of marker.” She handed Lauren a piece of paper, folded so many times it almost looked like origami, and escorted her back through the garden. “You promise?”
    â€œI promise.” Lauren closed the gate behind her.
    T HERE WAS DARKNESS inside Lauren’s house, and slightly cooler air. She closed the wooden door behind her, aware of the creak that David didn’t want to fix because he said he wanted to hear if someone was sneaking in. “Who might that be?” Lauren had asked. Then David told her how terrorists had snuck ashore from the sea and attacked a building in Nahariya some years ago. A woman hid in a crawl space with her baby daughter. She tried to soothe her and keep her quiet, muffling her cries, and accidentally suffocated her to death.
    Lauren stepped into the living room. There was a couch with worn burgundy fabric, an armchair with claw feet, and a porcelain lamp with a pleated shade. Against the back wall was a mahogany breakfront displaying antique dishes, its drawers filled with sterling silver napkin rings, cloth napkins, and the special holiday tablecloth that David’s mother, Miriam, had embroidered.