Genesis 50: (7) So Joseph went up to bury his father… (10) When they came to Goren ha-Atad, which is beyond the Jordan, they held there a very great and solemn lamentation; and he observed a mourning period of seven days for his father.
Sitting Shivah” is Hebrew for “seven.”
The tradition comes from Joseph’s period of mourning. There are rules for everything in Judaism, and Shivah prescribes many: Sitting low, covering mirrors, wearing old garments, not shaving, and avoiding sex — this last one wouldn’t be a problem.
The sevenfold nature of transformation propels my inner life, so I hoped sitting Shivah would launch my deeply desired journey into Bruce 2.0. I had no idea what forces would be put into motion, but I wanted to enter a crucible of pure feeling.
The day after Karen’s passing, her angels switched to clean-up mode, sorting through stacks of medicines, supplies, and food. Hillary baked brownies, Eleanor arranged candles, and Julie and Melissa managed the kitchen.
After a claustrophobic week indoors, we stepped out for a walk and instantly bumped into Cavit Agu, the imam of the Istanbul Cultural Center. Karen would want a multi-faith service, so, high-five, we now had an imam to recite the Call to Prayer.
The synchronicities of life function as a mystical navigation system.
Chance events confirm that the Play is unfolding according to divine guidance — or so I hoped. I grasped at every serendipity as proof of perfection in Karen’s unexpected and untimely death. Of course, there’s no way of really knowing, so you take what you get.
Our walk continued.
Carole Anne wanted to stop for chai at Karen’s favorite restaurant, Chai Pani, owned by Meherwan Irani, the great-nephew of Avatar Meher Baba—also a key figure for Karen. Nine years ago, Karen experienced a cathartic healing after chemo and surgery at the Meher Center in Myrtle Beach.
The Meher Center, Myrtle Beach, SC
The ladies went inside, so I parked myself at an outdoor table with Miko, our dog. I turned around and, boom, there was Mandy, my longtime yoga teacher, smiling and waving from inside. Minutes later, a server deposited a yummy spread of Indian delights — thank you, Mandy. Three synchronicities in one walk. As I nibbled the naan, I felt a ray of hope.
Karen’s beloved Chai Pani
If you visit the Meher Center, the tradition is to pray at the foot of the avatar’s bed. I don’t know if they had Meher Baba in mind, but Karen’s angels quickly created a similar shrine, draping Karen’s empty hospice bed with her picture, roses, candles, and a beautiful shawl holding her presence where she released into Light.
“Someone may want to come in here and pray in silence with Karen,” Carole Anne explained.
Sitting Shivah is not an invitation event. The family sits, and whoever comes, comes. Author Tara Brach puts Shivah in a Native American context:
“In the Lakota/Sioux tradition, a person who is grieving is considered most waken, most holy. There’s a sense that when someone is struck by the sudden lightning of loss, he or she stands on the threshold of the spirit world. The prayers of those who grieve are considered especially strong, and it is proper to ask them for their help.
“You might recall what it’s like to be with someone who has grieved deeply. The person has no layer of protection, nothing left to defend. The mystery is looking out through that person’s eyes. For the time being, he or she has accepted the reality of loss and has stopped clinging to the past or grasping at the future. In the groundless openness of sorrow, there is a wholeness of presence and a deep natural wisdom.”
Feeling raw in my lightning of loss, I took my seat.
The 7:00 p.m. hour arrived.
There were no floods of guests at the door, just one—our Romanian friend Ovidiu. Nine years ago, our beloved wives, Gabriela and Karen, were diagnosed with cancer in the same month. Gabriela’s cancer was grueling, with lots of ups and downs. One week before Gabriela passed, we visited her. Karen and I felt heartened by Gabriela’s buoyancy of spirit until suddenly, she was gone. We had no idea we were whistling past the graveyard.
Karen’s partner in cancer. Gabriela - 1969 - 2022 (died age 52)
At Gabriela’s eulogy, Ovidiu shared a remarkable love story that began at age 17 when he whisked Gabriela away on his bicycle handlebars during the Communist reign of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. The young Romanian couple settled in the U.S., where Gabriela built a Waldorf Children’s Garden in their home and backyard.
I invited Ovidiu inside.
“Ovidiu, thank you for coming,” I welcomed. “It means so much. Can I get you something? Some chai?”
Ovidiu skipped the niceties and embraced me in a soccer-spent, grief-hardened hug. I looked into his eyes, and I saw a warrior fresh from the battlefield of soul.
“Do you have an IPA?” Ovidiu asked. “In a glass?”
We sat on stools in the kitchen for two hours, me absorbing lessons from the road of loss. I pushed my tea away and poured myself an IPA.”
“Thank you,” Ovidiu said, seeing my kindred gesture.
Ovidiu didn’t try to soften my shock. With prophetic bluntness, he put the survivor’s sword in my hand and went straight to the rules.
“Number one is love,” Ovi blunted fiercely. “Love is the only thing that will sustain you.”
“Number two is one foot in front of another. Do not make plans or form ideas about what you will do. Just one foot, then another. It needs to be physical.” Ovidiu reached for his beer and let the pause surround me. “I needed help, so I worked with a friend who is a professional. He saw how I was stuck. He suggested, ‘Ovi, Why don’t you walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain?’ I didn’t question. I bought an airfare with no plans, no reservations, no nothing, and two weeks later, I was on the Camino putting one foot in front of another.”
Shit, I thought. Ovi’s setting the bar high.
Ovidiu opened his phone to show me a photo of the luxurious suite in Spain that was given to him for 78 euros. “Things like that kept happening,” he exclaimed in wonder.
“Number three is paying heed to the Messengers.”
“Messengers?” I asked. “Do you mean like the angels? It’s the same word.”
“Whatever word you want. You are on a road, a journey. Don’t get distracted. You will get guidance.”
Ovidiu pulled up another photo on his phone — a poem taped above his desk at the office. “I’ve carried that piece of paper since I was a young man. The HR people forced me to lose the tape, so now I have it in a frame. It’s the Litany of Fear from Dune. Have you read?”
“No.” (I hate anything about the desert but refrained from a wisecrack.)
Ovidiu squinted into the screen and read the Litany:
“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Whoa. I let the silence hover.
“Ovidiu, thank you. The line, ‘I will turn the inner eye to see its path.’ As you read, I could sense my fear evaporating — maybe a little.”
“That’s the whole thing,” Ovidiu lit up. “You let it go through without touching you, without taking you to the dark place.”
Ovidiu turned his stool to focus the mise-en-scène. We were now eye-to-eye.
“I won’t promise this will be easy. It will be hard.”
“Hard?”
“Yes, I am still coming home from a business trip, and I expect Gabriela to be here. Nine months later, the empty house still hits as a shock.”
I saw myself wandering around an empty six-bedroom 1895 house, staring at the sailing pictures.
Karen, British Virgin Islands
“Are you ready to hear about the dark place?” Ovidiu asked.
“The dark place?”
“Yes, the dark place of fear.”
My friend Amy was sitting at the counter, taking it all in, but she did not provide backup. I nodded with trepidation.
“Last year, the husband Luca you met at my son’s wedding died — from Covid,” Ovidiu said with a slightly lower pitch. “A few months after the husband passed, Ana committed suicide.”
“How awful. They were such a beautiful couple — with children.”
“THAT is the dark side.”
Ovidiu leaned uncomfortably close.
“You have life; STAY WITH LIFE! You may not find a purpose, but life itself is enough.”
My son handed Karen’s Chinese ceremonial sword to Ovidiu. He pulled it from its case.
“This is what I’m talking about. But you don’t need a physical sword. It’s in here,” Ovidiu affirmed, thumping his chest.
I accompanied Ovidiu to the door. He paused to hug me with strength, “One foot, then another. Call me. We will walk.”
And that was night one of Shivah.
I thought a lot about Ana’s suicide, fear, and the dark side of grief. Barely a day into my journey, I stumbled into Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal — or so it felt.
What will keep me from becoming like Ana and Luca? The self-help books tell us to face our grief and experience it fully — but they don’t draw a clear line between experiencing and drowning.
Ovidiu challenged me to hold the sword firmly and let my empty spaces refill with Bruce.
I went to bed emboldened to remain in myself, but it was short-lived. Earlier that day, the hospice nurse diagnosed me as having a “moderate risk for bereavement issues.” I felt falsely protected by years of spiritual work, so I blew off her warning (New-age people excel at bypassing). But damn it; I felt my “bereavement issues” creep into my psyche like thieves in the night.
As I lay in bed, the dark begat more darkness. Is this the dark side? I flipped on the light. Solved that. I pulled out my phone and started scrolling through the good wishes – dozens and dozens. One woman, Carol, a Facebook friend I didn’t even know, wrote:
“I am following your daily posts, and they are a gift to those who have walked similar paths; everyone’s story is different but the same. Your raw, beautiful honesty affects me on a very deep level. You may or may not realize this, but you are also giving yourself a gift. The days during and following the death of a loved one can become blurry, especially in the first few weeks and months…”
I read Carol’s blog to discover that she had lost two husbands, two parents, and a sister. Man, I thought, I’m still a rank amateur when it comes to grief.
I called her the next day and asked her about the dark place.
“It will eventually lift, but you are also fundamentally changed,” Carol explained. I felt she was initiating me into a secret society of grievers who knew the dark place and, God willing, stayed the course.
That first Shivah night, I tossed and turned, unable to shake the defining image from The Seventh Seal. Every film student in the last sixty years knows it. During the Black Plague of the Middle Ages, Max Von Sydow, a medieval knight, encounters Death. The subtitles are unnecessary when the somber character, robed in black, enters each scene. At the story’s core, Death offers the knight a chance to escape the inevitable in a chess match.
The film’s title comes from the Book of Revelation: “And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven…”
I lay there, suspended in that silence — like the pin-drop anticipation in the courtroom when the judge renders a verdict — but my life hung in the balance. Enveloped by the void, I waited for God to rule on the next chapter of my life.
Ovidiu challenged me to walk through the Black Plague of loneliness. But I resolved to find Light in the Silence.
The next day, I felt glum as rain poured outside. Hope springs eternal with young people and my kids convinced me to go out for Indian food. We needed a battery for the car — so now we had the perfect combo: a 12-volt battery and butter chicken.
My film musings morphed From Bergman to Hitchcock as I held a black umbrella over the auto parts clerk fumbling with sparking high-amperage cables in the rain.
Would Hitchcock have my phone ring? Nah, it hadn’t been invented yet. How about Woody Allen? It's a bit on the nose—deus ex machina—but Woody would definitely script it.
My phone rang. Should I pull it out of my pocket or focus on the guy about to be zapped by the battery? I apologize for the breach of battery etiquette, but I sneaked a peek. It was Suzy, my longtime artist friend from New York whom I affectionately call Quantum Girl.
“Suzy! You can’t believe the scene,” I said. “I’m sopping wet, holding a black umbrella over a battery installer. It could be Bergman, Hitchcock, or Woody Allen. What’s going on?”
“I talked to Shelly, the medical intuitive, today,” Suzy reported.
“Wow, I said. “Seems like a lifetime ago — what is it? Two or three weeks?”
“I told Shelly about Karen,” Suzy continued. “She remembered you and tuned in. She said that where Karen is, she is… she used the word, like a Buddha.”
“A Buddha?”
“Yes. She said that Karen is not going anywhere.”
“What does that mean?”
“So many people are just out of here when they’re done. Shelly said Karen isn’t going anywhere. She’s catching her breath. Everything went so fast, but she is really relieved. And she’s really, really happy.”
“Happy??” The rain soaked my clothes, but my heart instantly filled. I glanced toward the sky: “That’s my Karen!”
“Shelly said that for all those who helped her…”
“Her angels…
“Yes, and the people she’s close to, Karen’s job now is to help people sense the space between the worlds — to feel the boundaries, the veils between worlds becoming more porous.”
I let a feeling of radiant Light fill my being.
The O’Reilly parking lot felt strangely sacred. I wondered if Death ever gets confused by all this Light.
When I returned to the steamy car, I shared Karen’s report from the other side. The kids shrugged it off as clinical shock. They were salivating for the Indian buffet.
At the end of the Seventh Seal, Death barges into the room as the characters sit for a meal.
The knight’s squire protests Death’s intrusion, “Feel the immense triumph of this last minute,” the squire proclaims. “You can still roll your eyes and move your toes!”
I re-watched the scene and remembered Karen’s final words, “Life is so sweet.”
But that immense triumph of life over death is short-lived. In Bergman’s telling, death is capriciousness. It spares no one, including the knight. We see Death leading the knight hand-in-hand with his fellow travelers over a distant hill.
Bergman adds a redemptive note, ending the film with a young couple holding a beautiful infant. They see the macabre dance and exclaim, “They dance away from the dawn, and it's a solemn dance towards the dark lands while the rain washes their faces and cleans the salt of the tears from their cheeks.”
I stepped out of the rain, folded my umbrella, and squeezed back into the car. Maybe I was in clinical shock. I pondered, Am I the Knight or the young couple?
Death comes with a double edge — a descent into darkness while begetting life in a dance of renewal.
When I got home, I chose renewal. I wrote to my friends:
Our Karen is beaming with Light! I can feel it, and I’m not a psychic. Take a quiet moment today to bathe in it. You’ll be happy you did.”
Christ almighty that was powerful! More later....