Death, Taxes, and Needing a Lawyer

One of the unavoidable aspects of life is death. (Taxes, of course, being the other.) And with death comes emotion, stress, change, and a ton of paperwork. My dad and I sat in the hospital room as my mom passed, and it was not long before my dad said “I guess I need to find a lawyer.”?

My first reaction to my dad’s comment was “How have we created a society where one of the first thoughts a bereaved widower has is that he needs to find a lawyer?” (I will set aside that I thought my parents had a lawyer already, but it’s possible that paying a friend with a good bottle of Scotch to prepare your estate planning documents doesn’t really create the same sort of attorney-client relationship that paying for services with cash creates.)?

And I still want to explore that question, but that will come later, because I realized as I started to write a post on that question that I had also had a thought similar to my dad’s. In my case, an early reaction to my mom's death was “I have some questions for a rabbi.” In traditional observance of Judaism, the rituals around death are many but are also clear and consistent. Difficulty arises, though, when not everyone in the family observes the traditions of the religion in the same way. When this happens, the rituals that were clear and consistent are thrown into disarray.?

Let me elaborate. In traditional Judaism, the deceased person is buried promptly. Between the death and the burial, the relatives of the deceased are in a status where their only responsibility is to prepare for the funeral (and, of course, grieve). This stage is called “aninut.” The name isn’t important, except that I am going to refer to it below, so hold on to it for just a moment. Only after--and precisely after--the burial do the rituals of mourning begin. What if there is no burial? Or what if there isn't a prompt burial? My mom’s wish was to donate her body (a decision very much in keeping with her worldview that once you are dead, you are dead, and there is no purpose in burying or cremating the body before some use comes from it), meaning that any cremation and burial of remains won’t happen until some undetermined time, possibly as much as two years in the future. I knew there must be guidance out there for this situation. I accidentally asked the question of when shiva begins to two different rabbis; luckily they both gave the same answer.

It turns out that the basic answer to this question is that when the relatives no longer have any control over the body, this is when shiva begins. For my family, I chose to say that was when we left the hospital, though an alternative could have been when the organization to which my mom’s body was donated picked it up. In retrospect, it was probably the point at which my dad returned the paperwork to that organization, but that was the same day as my mom’s death. But for me, this highlighted a somewhat awkward benefit of the period of aninut: this gives the family a day or so to be supported by one or two close friends who can come and clean the house where the family will be sitting shiva. With shiva starting right away, and a complete inability to keep my house clean, I needed to spend the first day of shiva cleaning my house rather than sitting. Which, I’ll be honest, kinda sucked. In one way, I was treating the day as if I were in the period of aninut; in another way, though, the day was still being counted in the seven days of shiva, and technically I should have been saying kaddish already.?

Jewish rituals around death are very family- and community-focused. In a family with three different forms of observance among four (now three) people in three different homes in three different communities (both geographically and religiously/socially), these rituals which, as I mentioned above, are clear and consistent and make sense in the context of families with similar observance styles, maybe make a little less sense. Shiva is about being surrounded by family and friends. My dad is in Baltimore, not sitting shiva; my sister is in Virginia, not sitting shiva; and I am in DC sitting shiva, but as part of a small religious community such that I’ve actually spent a good amount of time at home alone. Which has given me plenty of time to write this rather navel-gazey post. (Thanks for reading this far.)

The moral of this unedited story? It may not be possible to eliminate the need for legal guidance following the death of a loved one; even in the clear and consistent procedure followed by traditionally observant Judaism, congregational rabbis are involved, or rabbis are called upon when a mourner’s community does not have a congregational rabbi. This does not mean that we should give up on trying to make this life event easier to manage without a lawyer, but might mean that it isn’t entirely society’s fault that a lawyer is necessary.

For friends who have experienced the loss of a close family member, where did you get information about what you needed to do? Do funeral homes have “what to do and how” packets that they give to families? Do hospitals, or doctors? Does the Department of Health? Did you use a search engine? Please share your experience in the comments. JusticeAccess will be looking at this issue so your perspectives will help us come up with ideas.