50. Death and burial

We have attended Laura Brody's tomb-stone dedication on Monday (bank holiday) - she had died of mesothelioma. So had Sandra Jacobs. That is curious, because asbestos dust that causes it is inhaled almost always by men - builders, electricians. But their female partners can get contaminated when they wash the dusty work clothes. It can take up to 20 years or more to develop; but once it is noticed and discovered, it is fatal within a year and there is no effective treatment.

When we buit our previous house extension, the building rules required an asbestos slab to line the garage ceiling. The carpenter, Dave Heeks, sawed the material without wearing a mask, and both Judith and our neighbour warned him and gave him a mask. We do not know whether he continued to use it, but some 30 years later we heard that Dave had died from mesothelioma.

At the cemetery we noticed the adjacent memorials of several other former friends: Jack Rosenberg, Lilian Goldsmith, Cecil Dalton, Rita and Stan Britain. All neat and polished slabs - a final payment for the dead relative. Sometimes I wonder whether a costly memorial suggests the survivors' worse conscience. With the passage of the years, we now attend the cemetery more often. My mother also used to complain: I have more friends in the cemetery than I have in town.

The jottings that now follow might upset reader[s]. Certainly Daphne should stop here. But there's no anger, Heather!

To begin with, I do not need the physical memorial as a reminders. I have not visited my parents' graves since their funerals decades ago: I can remember them vividly, and no slab of stone is required. In my irreverent humour in 1977 I deeply offended the stone mason in Israel when I ordered my mother's tomb stone. To his question, 'what sort of stone I had in mind', I replied 'the heaviest'. There is a tradition of resurrections in the holy land, of course. Why risk it?

In fact, if my wishes are fulfilled, I shall not be wasting good plant-growing ground for a grave. I am fully paid up for cremation. This also avoids the possible cold, rainy and mudy funeral at the cemetery. I mentioned this to Rabbi Hulbert as we squelched our way towards one burial recently. But he objected: the vapours of my amalgam fillings will pollute the air with mercury vapours. Well, perhaps the undertakers can extract those teeth first - they do it for implanted pacemakers, and the Nazis did it for the gold crowns...

Nor do I wish my ashes to be preserved: they belong in the nearest dustbin. Death is the final end of a person - perhaps the 'soul' persists in the DNA - but that DNA includes the bad as well as the good! The cremation ashes are waste. I was interested to learn the ideas of professor Isaiah Leibovitz on this topic. He was both highly intelligent and deeply orthodox. I knew the family - his eldest son was a colleague in medical school but died of cancer. Leibovitz said that after death there was 'nothing'. Absolutely true.

When I recently mentioned my ideas on cremation and 'no grave' to my relatives in Ein Gev, they were appalled at the thought, of not having a tomb to visit. Indeed, the cemetery at Ein Gev is lovingly tended and visited. But an annual Chinese meal sounds better.

Some time ago my cousin Amos and his wife showed me an interesting historical item: a simple metal box with a lid - about the size of one of those saccharin pill containers. It was to be hung around the neck and was used by my grandfather, when he was an artillery soldier in the first world war - on the austro-hungarian side. Inside the box was a small folded form. My grandfather had entered his name -Wilhelm Weis- and the following instruction if he were to be killed: 'WO GEFALLEN - RASH BEGRABEN' = where fallen - quickly buried. 'Quickly' was underlined. Ninety years later, I agree.
Wilhelm survived, and it is entirely thanks to him that we escaped from the Nazis. But that is another story.