For much of the past 25 years, I’ve tried to build failsafes and contingency plans in to most of the personal and professional facets of my life. Having these backups helped me feel safe, which I’m sure came with the territory of spending that time caring for a rapidly deteriorating parent. As a mechanism for coping with life’s weird curveballs, contingency plans conditioned me to constantly be on red alert, hoping that I could protect myself from the power of overthinking. As a mechanism for project or tour management, being a good chaos planner has sharpened into a remarkably helpful ability to anticipate problems and work smarter around them. Constantly having a built-in contingency plan has made me excellent at life’s ground game but lousy with anxiety.
Recently, my relationship to contingency plans experienced a tectonic shift, and it happened just a few days after we buried my dad. It was around that time that I realized how roughly 2600 pounds of dirt, and also logic, health, and basic human decency all weighing down on top of his casket, meant that I wouldn’t be able to bring him with me anywhere in life I may go. He now resides at a new address, and this one doesn’t come with relocation privileges. This cemetery is in a place I’ve never known, on a foreign street, in a neighborhood I’ve never been, where I will now travel to visit throughout the rest of my life. And the only reason I’m even going to this strange and unfamiliar place is because it has something of mine that I love, that I can’t take back, that my most devoted friends and loved ones helped me bury to the surface so that it safely stays there for the rest of time. A thing like that really makes you give up on trying to find contingency plans. For years, I built my life around contingency plans to feel secure, especially while caring for my dad. But when he passed, I realized some moments have no backup plan—they just are.
He died, my dad, around 3:30 in the morning. My dad died around 3:30 in the morning. Nine words make up that one tiny sentence and I’m not yet used to saying or feeling any of them. Three days after my dad died, we held a funeral for him, including a brief service where a deeply kind and special Rabbi (Greenbaum) spoke so eloquently about the friendship he formed with my parents during my father’s late stage disease. I read a eulogy written by my dad’s college roommate, who is, today, another well-respected Rabbi (Kieffer). Unable to make the trip from Israel, Rabbi Kieffer sent words, the way people did for millennia before social media. Sent words on the condition of someone passing. As I stood at the pulpit and read his fond farewell to my father and their lifelong bond, I felt humbled to read Sent Words written by a long-away Rabbi to a group of congregants as an honor to my dad. I felt such pride for him that his life warranted a Rabbi in a different country writing words and sending them. And then, I spoke from words written and collected over a quarter century of my lifetime, all in preparation for this exact moment, because I knew this moment would never offer a contingency plan and I never bothered looking for one. Afterward, the mourners caravanned to the cemetery and then back to my mother’s apartment to sit shiva for the week.
In the immediate days before he passed, I kept his small handbook of collected Judaic law pinned to my hip at all times, and referenced it constantly for a clear explanation on what steps would happen once he passed, what processes my mom and I might want to respect in the roles of mourners and preparers of his funeral, and what responsibilities come during the periods of mourning observed by Jews within the first day, month, and year after his passing. The book is called, in Hebrew, HaMadrich (המדריך), and it was printed in 1956, right around my dad’s birthday. According to his own hand-written inscription, my father purchased this book on October 16, 1980. My mom remembers him driving to Skokie from Highland Park, Illinois, because he needed some information to assist with an upcoming funeral. HaMadrich was his guidebook. The name translates into “The Guide.”
As a child, I knew this book for its black, scary cover and the way it only ever appeared when my dad was performing duties as a chaplain, representative of a synagogue, or at serious and somber moments as the religious head of our household. I now recognize how helpful it was for him to have this classic, respectful version of Cliffs Notes at hand for the most important rituals throughout the Jewish lifecycle. And as a grown man losing the first family owner of this book, I now know what it means to inherit my father’s collection of knowledge. He remains alive in his little notes in the margins. I ran my fingers over them as we drove to the cemetery from the funeral home.
Chapters 26 and 27 lay out all the laws pertaining to Judaism’s periods of mourning. Each fragment of the first year experiences different rituals, all of which are designed to gently separate the surviving family from the community with just enough distance as to make it clear that we are grieving, without completely withdrawing from daily life. Perhaps most meaningfully is that each period concludes with a ceremony that softly allows you to re-enter your community across those distinct separations.
The only thing harder than getting used to saying “he died, my dad, around 3:30 in the morning,” is that we are just reaching the end of the first month, and it feels like everything and nothing has taken place over these last thirty days. Not the family visits, or the retelling of memories, or the time spent intentionally doing nothing, when you can just sit with the reality of it all. Not the babkas, or the phone calls, or corresponding with as many people as possible to thank them for their kind words and support. Not the sleepless nights, or restless mornings, or long drives, all of which just happened, and yet feel as distant and as unfamiliar as possible. This is what they mean when they say that grief is not a linear process. It ebbs and flows, weaves and turns, and loves to jumprope with its order and availability. On days that feel like they should be angry, you might get acceptance. Sometimes you get bargaining and denial showing up together, or right behind one another. Man, what I wouldn’t give for a contingency plan right about now.
From the time my dad began hospice care to the end of his life, my mother and I talked quite often about plans, and in particular how he wanted to go. Years before, at a prior moment of intense disintegration where we thought we might lose him, he’d committed his wishes to paper in the form of an advance directive, guiding us and his care team to what steps and measures should and shouldn’t be taken to preserve his life whenever it was under extreme vulnerability. And even though he lacked the capacity to communicate much of anything by the end of his life, I reminded my mom that this advance directive was actually a gift he had given us in the past. By setting his wishes in ink, he committed himself and us to a series of answers in situations that would likely otherwise call for a contingency plan. Instead of casting us into the darkness of “should we’s” and “would he want’s,” he made these points very clear and saved us from unimaginable decisions we would have to make ourselves.
HaMadrich - “The Guide” - says that on the occasion of the thirty day mark, it’s a common tradition for mourners to visit the grave for the first time. In a year, we’ll lay a headstone there to mark his existence with the dates of a short story of his birth and passing. The pages of the book that offer instruction for things like the first visit or the dedication of the headstone all have his handwritten notes in red ink, with small bookmarks for quick reference. He frequented these pages often enough that he scribbled down his own thoughts to ensure proper use and dedication. Bringing it back to the cemetery on this first trip and using it to properly commemorate him, as he would have done, brings this book’s purpose full circle. A guide to the Jewish lifecycle. It outlives him and remains a part of him both at the same time.
From the trajectory of his sickness to his death, he only ever got one plan. There weren’t many other divergent possibilities on his path, and it was a downhill tumble for a really long time. When you think about it, few of us are ever lucky enough to get many backups or contingencies to life’s big stuff. It’s been a remarkable thing to see how he lived and died through his ethics and values, leaving us clear instructions for handling his passing, and an annotated guidebook for all of the respectful things to do and say as we mourn him. He set an example even with a disease that stripped him of possibility, or opportunity, or ever really having a say on where the path was taking him.
At a time of extraordinary uncertainty, these steps have offered clarity and direction. Cliffs Notes for the chaos. A guide. A backup. A plan.