Shitting Shiva

By Allie Bullivant
December 2021

Nothing adds to the anguish of a funeral like the presence of unruly children.

In Judaism there is a whole ritual to help with the “what the hell do we do now?” question of mourning: sitting shiva. The process is supposed to provide a sense of order and comfort.

Unless, of course, you add children.

We sat shiva once for my grandfather when I was nine. At the time my brother David was six. He was clueless about most things. My sister and I convinced him that after the service we were going back to Grandma’s to do something called “shitting shiva.”

When we arrived at her house David ran up the three steps to my grandparents’ porch. Relatives and strangers were sat there on withering boxes and crates. David paused at the top step and turned around.

“They’re shitting, Dad!” he announced.

The rabbi’s brow arched.

“What?” my father said.

David removed his yarmulke to punctuate the point.

“They’re shitting, Dad!”

“Excuse me?”

“Alison told me all about it. They’re shitting shiva.”

My father went primal. He chewed me out right there in front of everyone. But over his shouting I still could hear my great aunt Norma quietly laughing into her silk handkerchief.

It’s good to have an adult like my great aunt Norma in a situation like that. Norma was a patient and playful woman. She had one son, my dad’s cousin Robert, who was, at the moment, also trying not to laugh.

I’m not sure he understood what was going on. Robert was near my father’s age, but had the mental capacity of a six year old. He was gentle despite his enormous size –well over six feet tall – like a sort of Jewish Lennie from Of Mice and Men.

The porch was crammed with an assortment of black dresses and suits in the stifling heat of August. Small streams of sweat were visible on wrinkled foreheads. Most of the adults were far too large for their selected perch. Underneath my father’s cousin Diane, a Sunkist Orange carton sagged so dramatically I thought for certain it was going to pop like a balloon and send her cascading down onto the wooden slats in a thunderclap.

But by far the oddest thing about this strange assembly was the silence. No one was talking.

At my grandparents’ house there was always talking. Yelling, shouting, debating, swearing at the drivers that ignored the stop sign at the street corner.

But never silence.

After the funeral my grandmother planted herself in the kitchen, at the heart of the house, where she leaned over some loose papers and drank coffee or tea. Sometimes she’d say something to us through the screen window. A sort of confessional, but it was all the rest of us on the other side and no one was brave enough to offer any consolation to her.

A sizable spread of delicious foods was set out on a refrigerator box in the center of the porch. Pumpernickel bread and rye from the local deli, cucumber dip, lox, capers, liverwurst that my brother stuck his finger in because it “looked like ashes” and he was stubbing out his cigarette “like Grandpa Marty.”

This antic did not go over well. Several aunts mumbled in disgust. It was how my grandfather died after all, lung cancer, from smoking probably thousands of Marlboros on the same porch. No one wanted to be reminded of that.

After David’s intervention, no one touched the food. I stared at the bread longingly. I wanted the matzo too.

My cousins seemed more proficient at partially starving and yielding to the expectations of sitting shiva. Two of them were playing tictactoe on the side of a box in silence. Another was reading a book. I wasn’t entirely sure you were allowed to play a game or read for pleasure sitting shiva, but the rabbi didn’t seem too concerned. He was busy running his fingers along the length of his suit jacket and itching his eyebrows.

It was all so terribly boring.

What was I supposed to do? Rifling through the tool shed would be too risky. Slipping into the backyard wouldn’t work either. So, I excused myself and headed for the bathroom – the one with the miniature of Rodin’s The Thinker next to the plunger.

I always enjoyed playing with The Thinker when nature called.It looked like he was sitting shiva too, I thought, crouched over on his small stone seat.Or shitting shiva, considering the location and all.

When I knelt down to pick him up I noticed the unusual presence of a black sheet draped over the wall mirror. Of course I didn’t know this was part of Jewish mourning – mirrors are covered to avoid self-reflection and to direct attention back to the recently deceased.

I began to play with one corner of the sheet, folding it up to reveal a small portion of the mirror, then back down, trying to create a little disco ball effect with my grandmother’s vanity light.

It was spooky, that tiny fraction of a reflection.

Gradually I got more into it, swirling around in a sort of a dance as I blew on the sheet and let it flap around to spread thin fluorescent streaks across the darkness.

Until I slipped and knocked into a shelf I forgot was there. Unidentified flying objects came cascading down onto the floor in a thud. The Thinker fell over, too.

My grandmother stood up from her chair. “What are you doing in there, Alison?”

Before I could answer, the door swung open and a light snapped on to reveal the black sheet in a lump on the ground next to a dozen of my grandmother’s Avon soaps.

The products she didn’t sell she kept piled up in the bathroom. From the looks of things it had been a bad year for cherry-scented bar soaps shaped like fire-trucks. My grandmother glared from the doorway.

“Oh for God’s sake!” She shook her head, then mumbled something in Yiddish. “Steven, your daughter has been messing with my summer collection!”

Within minutes, all of the children and poor Robert were sent to the back room to “wait out” the rest of the afternoon. “No television!” my grandmother said as she stared at me. “Don’t touch the guns either.”

Over the years Grandpa Marty had purchased and mounted dozens of antique guns from various American wars. He had them on display in the back room, his favourite place to watch late night television and smoke his pipe.

I liked the Revolutionary War pistol. Naturally I’d tried a handful of times to take it down, as well as the Civil War rifle, and some mysterious looking handgun labelled “Texas, Alamo.”

Robert saw me eying two of the weapons and shook his head.“Alison, don’t touch them.” His voice was soft and pleading.

I sat beside him on the ground.

“Did you drink any milk this morning?” Robert asked. He thought the answer to all of the world’s problems was to drink milk and then do ten push-ups.

I shrugged.

He put his hand on my bicep. “You’re not very strong. You gotta drink milk to get big and strong.”

“But I don’t like milk,” I said.

“Well if you are strong you can grow up and kill Nazis like your grandpa.”

For a moment, all the nervous energy in my body went from liquid to solid. It was the first time I had heard the word Nazi. It was also the first time I heard that my grandfather had killed anyone. Neither of these statements had registered entirely, but I felt a hint of their heaviness, and Robert’s expressive eyes only added to that feeling.

I knew Grandpa Marty had been a soldier. He’d tell me about it sometimes when he was tired. The television would go to commercials between Looney Tunes and he’d yawn and look at one of the weapons tacked to the wall and he’d say something unexpected like:“Did you know a tank is warm to the touch?”

Or he’d laugh at Wylie Coyote and say:“On a hillside in Italy I handled a machine gun better than anyone in all the Wild West. Bet you didn’t know that.”

I was only half listening, mesmerized by the show, and he’d sit there beside the gaudy lamp and smoke. His words would hang in the air around us, in the blue puffs that came from his cigarette.

It was strange to think that he wasn’t around anymore. And that Robert seemed to know things about him that I didn’t.

“What’s a Nazi?” I asked.

“Stop being such a retard!” my cousin Adam snapped. “We’re stuck back here because of you. Now we’ll never eat.”

“You’re the retard!” I said.

“No one is a retard!” Robert interjected. “My mommy says that is a very bad word.”

Adam blushed and slid back onto the couch.

“What’s a Nazi?” I asked Robert again in a whisper.

Robert smiled. “If you drink some milk later, I’ll tell you.”

“Okay, well I’ll drink some milk now!”

Thankfully Robert had the good sense to follow me as I raced to the kitchen. Grandma was not in her chair. Without asking or thinking I reached into the refrigerator and began to chug straight from the carton.

“That’s not how you drink milk!” Robert said.

“What’s going on in there?” someone hollered from the porch.

I slammed the carton back in place. “Now will you tell me what a Nazi is?”

Grandma, my father, and two of my grandfather’s veteran friends walked into the kitchen just as I said it. My father turned pale. The two veterans froze in place. Robert twirled his black hair between his fingers.

“What? What’s wrong? Why is everyone so quiet?”

My father lunged toward me just as Robert did. He stood between my father and I, tremendous and quiet.

“Robert, please move,” my father said.

Robert was an entire head taller than my father. I crouched behind him.

“I told her if she drank milk I would tell her about Nazis,” Robert explained.

“Now? Why? What the hell do you know about Nazis?”

Robert frowned.

“I know a lot about Nazis,” he said. “They hated Jews. So Marty fought them. He killed them. Nazis hated us. They put us in trains and – ”

“Alright, alright, enough,” my father said.

“Why did they hate Jews?” I asked.

“My god, do you believe this?” my father said to no one. “Talk about timing. Just go back there and sit.”

“There’s nothing to do!” I whined. “Plus how come Robert knows everything and I don’t know anything about Grandpa?”

“Robert doesn’t know anything!” my father said. “Now go!”

“He does too!” I said. “Robert, you do too know things.”

Robert took my hand. “Let’s go back with the other kids.”

My father shook his head. “You know what? Change of plans. Forget shiva. Tell the rabbi I can’t take it anymore. The kids can come up front. Why don’t you play soccer or something in the yard?”

My cousins were thrilled at this turn of events. They went storming through the house as Robert fetched a ball from a forlorn corner of the backyard.

At least out front the adults could keep an eye on us. Plus we were allowed to break into the food, which had remained largely untouched.

This was enough to send the rabbi over toward the whitefish salad. Pretty soon all the other adults were eating too. Even Grandma.

I played in my usual style of no-holds-barred, run like crazy toward the ball regardless of team loyalties. My funeral dress was quickly covered in grass stains. We used the flagpole as one of the goal posts. It had a new flag flying, a black flag I’d never seen before with the words POW MIA in the middle.

From the porch I could hear some of the adults had picked sides to cheer for. Robert was playing unofficial referee from the side-line. This meant occasionally he’d whistle at someone and clap his hands. No penalties were enforced.

Later in the game I tried unsuccessfully to pounce on the ball to keep it from the goal.“That was some tough playing,” someone said to me from the side of the porch. He stepped down toward me.

It was one of the veterans that had heard me ask Robert about Nazis in the kitchen. He had pale blue eyes and white hair and a Mid-Western accent that sounded like something from television. His uniform was a poor fit; too tight in some places, far too loose in others.

“You’re tough like your granddaddy,” he said. “Did you know that?”

I shook my head. It was weird hearing him say “granddaddy” instead of grandpa. But I let it slide.

The man stared up at the black flag. “You know your granddaddy saved my life,” he said in a low voice. “Twice.”

“Really?”

“It was in Italy. You ever been to Italy?”

“No,” I said. “But I am half Italian. And I like pizza.”

He smiled. “Your grandpa could throw a grenade like most people throw a baseball. Easy peasy. Perfect strikes. Always perfect strikes.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Like he meant it. Like you jumping on that ball.”

“I play soccer for St Margaret’s league,” I explained.

“I can tell,” he said. “Well I guess I’m going to get some more food. Never had some of this stuff before.”

“The lox is the best,” I explained. 

“Thanks for the tip,” he replied. “You know, he would have liked you kids running around like this. Instead of just shitting around.”

My mouth hung open as he winked at me before walking away.