Mourning on Purim
It was the saddest Purim of my life. I stood on the high ground of the cemetery on a clear and cold winter day, the ground sloping down towards the east, the office buildings of Manhattan reflecting the sun in the distance. My deceased wife’s casket lay behind me, and dozens of eyes faced me.
I stood in shock at her passing at age sixty-four, future grandchildren never to be known by her, our family gathered together one last time.
Purim masks and costumes were removed, to be worn again after the funeral. I saw people that I hadn’t seen in years or decades, grayer and balder and heavier and more weathered than the last time I had seen them, neighbors and friends who remembered Esther in better days.
They remembered Esther as a young mother with rosy cheeks, before the dementia and the emaciation.
I was moved that so many people came on Purim, leaving the realm of simchah for the mitzvah of honoring the dead.
Jewish tradition says the soul of the departed hovers between two worlds until the burial, the neshamah hovering over the grave. I also hovered between two worlds, in a space between married and widowed, like shedding an old skin while waiting for a new one to grow in.
Purim day was an odd filter overlaying the transition.
Although the tradition is to not deliver eulogies on Purim, exceptions are made.
Until the burial, I was exempt from any involvement in the celebration, and after the burial, the halachah prescribed a muted observance, including a Megillah reading in my home instead of public participation in the shul. My friend, Simon, came and read in his animated way, the feeling and dialogue of the narrative expressed through the words and musical notes.
Huddled around my dining room table, the familiar characters came alive: Queen Esther in her splendid gown, Haman with pointy ears and a waxed mustache, Mordechai in a long beard and turban. I didn’t know at the time, but two years later I would be remarried and living in Great Neck, New York, in a neighborhood of Persian Jews, direct descendants of the very Jews that were saved by Queen Esther.
As the twists and turns of the Purim story unfolded, I felt an unseen hand guiding me in a new and unknown direction.
“Today we read Megillat Esther,” I began my eulogy. Although the tradition is to not deliver eulogies on Purim, exceptions are made.
“Queen Esther risked her life to approach the king, to save the Jewish people from Haman’s evil decree. And so too, my Esther grew up in the shadow of parents who escaped Hitler’s evil decree. Esther lived with the trauma she absorbed from her parents waking up screaming in the middle of the night, from her father sitting on the porch staring into the distance, a far-away look in his blue eyes—his body in America but his inner life back in Europe.
“Esther’s children—our children—were her joy, the sunlight peeking through the dark clouds of anxiety and depression, and she rode the ups and downs of their lives like a bronc rider, never giving up on them until the end. Her frail body had withered to a thin reed, and her mind became an echo chamber of confusion and dismay.”
The faces in the audience were a journey through time, faces Esther had known over the thirty-six years we lived in Passaic, New Jersey.
I was surrounded by memories—of friendships, of shared Shabbat meals, of a life woven deeply into a community. Now those memories flew at half-mast.
As I eulogized her, and her body was about to be lowered into the ground, a lifetime together passed before my eyes.
Even on Purim, life and loss intertwined in ways I could not yet understand.
Efraim Jaffe is an independent certified financial planner. He lives in Great Neck, New York.