To the Woman Whose Body I Washed
Three days in the morgue and the chemicals released in death had turned your skin the color of rust. Your torso was stiff and torqued to the left, where I happened to be standing. One of your eyes, now filmy yellow, was open, and appeared to be trained on me as though suspicious of my motives.
Your misgivings would not have been wrong.
Just moments before, you were wheeled from the cold room in the Chapel basement to the alcove where I stood with five other gloved and gowned women. Within pale mustard walls, under harsh fluorescent lights, we, who’d be the last on earth to see you, would perform the ancient Jewish ritual of Tahara. We’d wash, shroud, and lay you in a pine coffin. But before we ever touched your body, we asked your forgiveness, apologizing, in prayer, “for any distress we may cause you.”
Earlier, in the lobby, I’d met the others. Ashkenazi women of the Upper West Side—two therapists, a lawyer, one rabbi, a translator. I knew some by sight; others were friends of friends. They’d all done this before. Only I was new, having just recently volunteered. Fresh from two decades of single motherhood, I sought to reconnect to the synagogue community, a spiritual home where I’d once been active.
Before we headed down, two who’d known you spoke of your life. The facts seemed simple: You were loved. You’d negotiated life’s stages with dignity. A lawyer at a time when few women were, you’d helped draft voting rights legislation and, as an activist, “prayed with your feet.” You’d raised four children, had a long marriage. One woman said she’d seen you only recently on Zoom, joyfully singing in the synagogue choir. You were ninety-seven.
I knew this tribute was something of an arrow shot through your life, defining a path far straighter than the one you’d likely lived. Still, I wondered what you would have thought hearing this version of your story. Would you break down and weep at this picture of its scope and significance? I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought you’d made more of your life than I had of mine. My work contributions were showy but perishable. Yours were lasting. You’d had a successful marriage. Mine had failed, as did my fertility, although adopting and raising my daughter may turn out to be my one lasting achievement.
Once we suited up to work, spasms of anxiety began. Why was I here on a Saturday night washing a dead person I never knew? In Jewish tradition, Tahara is considered an act of hesed shel emet, the highest form of kindness since it cannot be repaid. But kindness was not my only motive. Easier than answering “Why?” was answering “Why now?” My life had taken a turn. My daughter was in college. My partner and I had resolved to love one another without sharing a home. I’d saved enough to relieve financial stress. But tranquility didn’t suit me. I missed the urgency—that sometimes perversely thrilling state of emergency—I’d run on at school, work, and in parenthood. I dreaded stagnation and was groping toward I knew not what.
In that narrow, underground nook, our rosh, or leader, angled the gurney with your feet toward a sink filled with fresh water. Your head was elevated on a lucite block at the gurney’s other end. When she uncovered your body, my stomach twinged. I closed my eyes and drew a breath.
I was supposed to be the ideal person for this task. I’d worked in an ER, ridden ambulances as a student volunteer, and witnessed trauma surgery as a young reporter. I thought I’d been born with an odd bone that enabled me to witness death with equanimity. My father, a doctor, had sowed in me the notion that we are all just creatures, every one of whom would ultimately be a dead body. When I was seven, he brought a fetus on a bloody napkin upstairs and showed it to us kids as we brushed our teeth. Toothbrush in hand, I leaned over and stared at the lump of glistening gray tissue. Alert to what earned my father’s admiration, I refused to turn away. I thought myself unfazed by death.
But now, seeing you, your open, twisted jaw frozen in an expression of ferocity, my heart beat emphatically and I had to reconsider.
I began to wash your face with a wet cloth. Wiping your eyelids, I was flummoxed: the left one kept popping open. I tried to nudge it down, to no avail. Your head rested uneasily on the raised block as, given the twist of your torso, it kept sliding off. When it first slipped, I caught it just before it slammed onto the table. Cradling it in my arms flooded me with tenderness and sorrow, the solidity and shape so much like other heads I’d embraced: my mother’s, my lover’s, my daughter’s.
After I reset you on the block, I began to remove nail polish from your left hand. Your long, cold fingers were tipped with snazzy, sparkly, blue, so lively. I loved the color. Death must have surprised you; the fresh polish told me you’d expected to outlive this manicure.
Finishing your hand, I moved on to the left side of your body, sponging the curve of your shoulder—you were big-boned and tall. I couldn’t help but notice the hard-to-look-at age spot in the shallow of your belly that had once flared with children but now stretched between jutting pelvic bones. I felt remorse at noticing, realizing that, being dead, you were exposed to my gaze. But seeing what age had done to you made me worry about how the years ahead, should I survive them, might treat my own body. The tremor that sometimes affects my left hand returned. As we earlier prayed for “the courage and the strength to properly perform. . . this holy task of cleaning . . . the body. . . and to fulfill the commandment of love,” I knew that when fear for myself displaced concern for you, it was, indeed, a failure of love. If there was a “you” still there, could you forgive me?
“Spending this night with you was, I suppose, a stab at getting on friendlier terms with death. And perhaps, too, at finding something, anything, to counter the terrifying notion that death is total, preserving nothing.”
Perhaps you might if you’d known that both of my parents had recently died, and, for the first time in my life, the crushing fact of mortality pressed itself upon me. Each birthday brought new alarm. And although life is difficult and, at times, intolerable, I could not imagine ever leaving it. But you, you were now beyond life, beyond Time and, I hoped, given that slippery head rest, beyond hurt. Spending this night with you was, I suppose, a stab at getting on friendlier terms with death. And perhaps, too, at finding something, anything, to counter the terrifying notion that death is total, preserving nothing.
I did find solace in that first prayer, shockingly addressed to you. Apparently, the rabbis believed there still was a “you” to ask. I was lifted, too, by the other women. Two were daughters of Holocaust survivors. They were preparing a body for proper burial when so many of their relatives had been shoveled into mass graves or incinerated to anonymous ash. Looking at them in that basement room, I thought of a phrase from the closing of Middlemarch: "unhistoric acts," which George Eliot deemed essential to the "growing good of the world.” Her vision aligned with the Jewish command of “mitzvot,” deeds of courage and care that disseminate from one life to another, on and on, gathering the heft to slowly, painfully mend the world. In this way the acts themselves acquire a kind of immortality, perhaps the only immortality for which we can hope.
It was now time to help the rosh pour three buckets of fresh water in a continuous motion over your cleansed body, all of us reciting: “Living water, you are a fountain, a well, a river flowing from the mountains.”
After the cleansing, we dressed you in a simple shroud plus a head and face covering that the rosh explained affirms belief in human equality, protecting the poor from embarrassment and the rich from a last temptation to show off. While some of the other women prepared the pine coffin with a bed of straw that they covered with a sheet of linen, I realized that I was holding your hand. I didn’t let go even when it was time for us to lift you into this box. A glance from the rosh and I released you. Once in your final place, you were a figure whose distinct identity was now obscured by loose white garments, thin as cheese cloth. We sprinkled soil from the Holy Land upon your heart and recited a last prayer: “Peace shall come and each of us shall rest in our appointed place.” The lid was closed.
As the others washed up, I stayed behind, standing for a moment beside you, echoing that first prayer with one of my own: Forgive me for imbuing you with everything I wanted you to mean to me. Forgive me for finding parts of you I could not love. Forgive me for saying yes to the right task for perhaps the wrong reasons. Forgive me for being the kind of person who needs to write this. Forgive me for hoping you might help me change my life.
About the Author
Robin Reif is a writer, storyteller and sometime brand strategist who lives in Manhattan. Her work has recently appeared in The New York Times’ Modern Love column, McSweeney’s, and Yes! Magazine. Her story Oranges was published in The Missouri Review in Winter 2021. Her first contribution to Off Assignment, "To the Greek Who Helped Me Jump In," appeared in July 2021. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Bennington Writers Seminars. You can visit her website here.
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Header photo by David Becker.
Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
