'Being of use means being in control, no matter what else is looming. That control, of course, is an illusion, one that the pandemic has laid bare for so many.'
Illustration: Jeanne Verdoux Death is a busy thing. Or it was, in the before. Usually, when a member of my congregation dies, it triggers an intricate choreography of people swirling around the grieving family getting the things-that-need-doing done. There are funeral arrangements to be made, flowers to be ordered, meals to be cooked.
The realizations set in: No one could go sit with him or take him a meal for fear of spreading the virus. He did not know when he could get, or even see, her body; the mortuaries were overflowing in our neighborhood. There would be no service with pews full of mourners, no crowd to make funeral potatoes for. I have never felt so helpless.
Both Judaism and Islam call for a body to be burried swiftly, yet the backlog at morgues and funeral homes has meant families go days or weeks, not hours, before being able to reclaim their loved one. “It’s not just a practical anxiety,” Aisha Ahmad, who grew up in a tight-knit Muslim community in New Jersey, said. “It’s a spiritual anguish because the family isn’t able to fulfill their religious duties.
In my own reflections, I wondered if my grief was for the sister who had died, for her family, and our community, or if it was for the loss of my usefulness and my discomfort with not being able to work my way out of my feelings. I stood in his living room, soaked from one of the ceaseless April storms, proffering a bastilla I’d made for Easter, and learned that they had been married for 38 years. That they had grown up in Guyana before moving to New York. That she loved being in the kitchen, making cook-up rice or other things that reminded them of home. That after she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a few years ago, she settled for sitting in the doorway and ‘conducting’ as her husband cooked to her instructions.
Monday morning, nearly a month after our sister died, we finally held her funeral. The mortuary was so overbooked and busy collecting bodies from the morgue that they couldn’t transfer her casket to our chapel in Midwood. So my husband and I put on our masks and biked through the empty Brooklyn streets out to the Flatlands, where we had a 30-minute time slot in a dimly lit room to remember her life and mourn her loss. There were just eight of us there, spread out in chairs six feet apart.
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