You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It's 5:52 a.m. I click on the link and enter the waiting room. Messages fly back and forth on a group chat in WhatsApp. “We are here,” says one. “So are we.” “When does it begin?” asks a third. I type, “I am here too,” and wait.
Promptly at six, I hear the now familiar tone as the Zoom window opens, announcing “Joining the Meeting of Rabbi Shmuelson.” In London it is 11:00 a.m. I peer at my laptop and see the rabbi standing in the foreground. Along the top of the screen, there are thirty or so tiny boxes that I scroll through, looking at the images of family members and friends, also on standby.
I know from my cousin in London that it was very hard to schedule this time slot. They were able to sandwich us in only by pleading for a weekend morning, explaining that there was family in America as well as England. The funeral—from beginning to end—would take no more than thirty minutes.
The day looks cold and windy. The rabbi is wearing a black coat, dark glasses resting on the bridge of his nose, coattails whipping in the wind, kippah askew. His hands, reddened with cold, grip a leather-bound prayer book that he holds open with one hand, ready to turn the pages with the other. I can see a gold ring on his right pinky finger. Yellow and pink sticky notes sprout from the pages like tiny daffodils. Standing behind him and to his right is a gravedigger all in black—black face mask, black gloves, black pants, a black fleece jacket. Another gravedigger is posted behind him, to the left. Beside the rabbi I see the wooden box, elevated on a bier above the freshly dug grave. Inside the coffin lies the body of my mother's sister, who has died not from coronavirus but in the time of