A moratorium on mourning during the global pandemic still affects us today, says SOC professor emeritus Richard Stack: “You couldn’t visit your sick loved ones for fear of making them sicker, and people who lost someone in those years are still sad because they didn’t get to grieve properly.” In We Who Grieve: Understanding Our Most Painful Emotion, Stack provides reassuring practical advice on how to cope with a universal human experience that many prefer to push away.

What inspired this book?

After my mother’s death, a cousin [gave me] Anita Diamant’s Saying Kaddish, which explained the history and rationale behind the Jewish mourning rituals I was observing. I found it comforting, and it got me curious about how other cultures mourn.

Who is your ideal reader?

The two audiences I’m aiming for are those in the immediate throes of grief—and that could mean their loved ones died yesterday or within the last two years—and those who love them and are trying to help them. We don’t know how to be helpful because we haven’t been taught.  

How did your volunteer work at the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing inform your writing?

I was an assistant to a caseworker. In 45-minute group therapy sessions for a school year, we worked with kids who had lost someone important to them. I learned as much from them as they learned from me. 

What did your research reveal?

What surprised me was the commonality [among cultures] more than the uniqueness. I had a good interview about the New Orleans jazz send-off with the father of a [former] student who’s a hobby historian of Louisiana culture. 

What’s your message for readers?

Once you’ve grieved, like it or not, you become an expert in it, and people lean on you because you’ve had that experience. We who have grieved know the deepest sorrow, and it’s up to us to amp up empathy in the world.

What can we learn from other cultures about mourning?

We’d all benefit from being more reflective, more reliant on our community. We could accept death as a part of life, take the necessary time to process it, and understand that our loved one is no longer with us, but the relationship continues. 

The illustration on the back cover of the book is a red door, partially open, with the light from outside visible through windows at the top of the door. What is its significance? 

That's my wife's artwork [Beverly Ress]. What you see through the windows is fuzzy, dreamlike, so you don’t know what’s there. And the doorknob is missing, so you don’t control that passage.  

Epilogue

Besides Saying Kaddish, what other books have you found to be comforting? 

The one I like best is It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine. Another one is Tuesdays with Morrie [by Mitch Albom].

Do you gravitate toward a particular genre in your personal reading?

I read contemporary books on what makes our society tick or why it’s screwed up.

What have you read recently?

The Brothers Karamazov. I’m a slow reader, and it took me months to get through. 

Best time and place to read?

I love reading in my garden late in the day, while the sun’s still shining but maybe setting. It’s a nice way to unwind.

Favorite bookstore or library?

Politics and Prose

Any guilty pleasures?

I love reading sports stuff. I’ve been a fan and participant all my life, so I understand the action that’s being described and can relate to what the athletes are thinking about. 

Which books have made lasting impressions on you?

Food First by Frances Moore Lappé was instrumental in my journey to become the founding executive director of the Capital Area Food Bank, and Sister Helen Prejean’s Dead Man Walking led me to the National Coalition to Abolish Death Penalty [during] my first sabbatical.

You’re hosting a dinner party for three writers—dead or alive. Who’s on the guest list?

Groucho Marx, one of the world’s wittiest people; Paul Simon, who wrote the soundtrack to my life; and Dostoevsky, so I can tell my friends, “Hey, I had Fyodor over for dinner last night.”

Excerpt from We Who Grieve:

At my age, well into my 60s when these words are being written, I feel fortunate that I’ve experienced the losses of only three members of my immediate family. However, these deaths pierced my heart with near-paralyzing grief.

I’ve mourned the deaths of others, for sure, but only three have changed my life. They occurred in this order and at these points in time: my beloved grandmother, Rifka Hankin, my favorite person in my world, died when I was 29; my father whom I so admired, Norman Stack, died when I was 38; and I was 58 when my greatest teacher, my mother, Ida Stack, died.

A certain burial practice is the through line for these experiences, leading to the writing of this book. The evolution of my thinking about this custom made me realize the value of rituals even when we do not fully understand them. I wanted to dig deeper into cultures’ (my own and others’) methods for comforting mourners.

For those left behind, how is the excruciating pain of being a survivor eased? How does one get on with life?

In her profoundly personal reflections, Sherri Mandell examines those questions. She confesses that her broken heart will never be the same, that she will always long for her teenage son and feel the pain of his absence. But she believes it is possible to build a new heart.

“Many of us live with broken hearts,” she writes. “But when you touch broken hearts together, a new heart emerges, one that is more open and compassionate, able to touch others, a heart that seeks God.” Thus, Mandell explains “the blessing of a broken heart,” the title of her tender narrative (Mandell, 7).

The burial practice I questioned takes place at the end of a gravesite ceremony. It is not unique to the Jewish faith, but this is how I’ve experienced it. As the prayers of mourning are concluded, the casket is lowered into the ground. Next to the burial plot is a large mound of earth, the earth that was displaced to dig the grave.

Mourners huddle together, moving the few steps from the makeshift tent where the prayers were recited to the pile of earth beside the hole. Two shovels have previously been jammed into the mound by groundskeepers. The shovels await the hands of community members who will start to bury the body.

The shovels are passed among the community participants. Each sorrowfully, dutifully drops a shovel’s worth of earth into the hole, then gives the tool to the next person until it finally reaches the hands of family members.

When I was given the shovel at my grandmother’s funeral, I thought, “How cruel. I’m actually expected to shovel dirt on my Bobbeh’s coffin?” The action seemed disrespectful to the deceased. And it struck me as a harsh and hurtful gesture to her loved ones.

“How could you ask us to do this?” I thought. “Is this any way to show sympathy?”

It was a small Orthodox cemetery. No words were spoken. But it was clear what I was expected to do when the shovel came my way.

Later, when I asked about this custom, I was told simply that it is part of the finality of the funeral. It is meant to bring closure to the burial and begin the most intense phase of mourning, the one-week ritual of sitting shiva.

I found the brief explanation almost formulaic, not the least bit satisfying. My sadness was tinged with anger and confusion at not knowing why I just participated in shoveling earth onto the box containing my beautiful grandmother.

Nearly a decade later my dad died. When the shovel came my way this time, I knew what I was supposed to do. My attitude had softened frolm belligerence to acceptance.

I still wasn’t crazy about the custom, but I’d learned that one way to interpret the communal shoveling is to think of it as the last favor you will ever do for the deceased, one he cannot return. I could see the sympathy if this is thought of as an act of mercy, a final kindness extended to one’s loved one.

Twenty years assed, and it was my mom’s time. She was a teacher of all things Jewish: Sunday school, Hebrew, Yiddish, music, theater, and bar and bat mitzvah training. At her frigid gravesite, the rabbi spoke directly to my brother and me.

“You may not know this teaching I’m about to tell, but your mother explained the custom in which we’re about to engage this way,” He was referring to the ritual shoveling of earth onto her casket.

“Your mother said that this final act was like putting a blanket on a baby.”

Like putting a blanket on a baby?! How could anyone object to that? In fact, who wouldn’t want to participate in such a loving gesture?

With those few words, my mother had me doing a mental somersault, a feat of cerebral gymnastics that was nearly 30 years in the making. I had gone from bristling against this ritual to tolerating it and then embracing it.

As I stood over the gravesite and tossed a couple of extra shovelfuls of earth into the hole, I couldn’t but think, “Mom you’re teaching me still.” 

From We Who Grieve: Understanding Our Most Painful Emotion © 2024 Richard A. Stack by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640.