“What zechus did my mother have? Well, the only zechus of hers that I can think of is that she wasn’t cremated”

During the shivah for my mother, I got a call from a woman who said she was a member of the local chevra kaddisha.

“Can I come speak to you?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. I did not know this woman, but if she wanted to visit me during shivah, why should I refuse?

“I do the taharos for the women of this community,” she said, by way of introduction. “I keep this part of my life very quiet, though, since I don’t want people to think of me as the lady from the chevra kaddisha. But after doing the taharah for your mother, I just had to come and ask you who she was.”

“Who was my mother?” I echoed. “I don’t know. A regular person, I think. She wasn’t religious at all. She grew up Reform, before the war, and moved with her parents from Europe to America, where she married a non-Jew and built a family. Does that answer your question?”

The woman looked confused. “I’ll tell you why I’m asking,” she said. “We were three women doing the taharah on her, and we were astonished to see that her face was shining with an otherworldly glow. It was obvious that we were dealing with a very special person.

“The three of us kept asking each other, ‘Who is this woman? Do you know of any chashuve women or rebbetzins who passed away recently?’ But no one had any idea who she was. That’s why, when I found out that she had a daughter who had flown in for the levayah, I decided to come meet you and find out what zechus your mother had.”

“What zechus did my mother have?” I repeated. “Well, the only zechus of hers that I can think of is that she wasn’t cremated.”

My mother, an only child, was charged with the task of cremating her own parents, as per their express wishes. Somehow, she managed to dig up a “rabbi” who officiated over the interment of their ashes in a non-Jewish cemetery. From then on, she often said that she wanted to be cremated, like her parents.

My only brother, Bruce, and I grew up with zero religion; I discovered I was Jewish only when I was a teenager. Through a highly unlikely sequence of events, I became a baalas teshuvah in my twenties, eventually marrying a ben Torah and becoming the proud mother of a frum brood.

Knowing how distant my mother and brother were from religion, I never said anything to them about keeping mitzvos. But about ten years after I became frum, when my mother was in her early seventies, I decided to broach the subject of death with her. “You know, Mom,” I said, “I’ve never asked you to keep anything Jewish. But one thing I’d like to ask you is that you be buried, not cremated.”

“Why, Sharon?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “to you it won’t make a difference anyway, because by then you’ll be dead. But for me it will be very hard if you are cremated. You think there’s no life after death, but I think there is, and I’ll be so much happier if you are buried.”

My mother and I always enjoyed a good relationship, despite my defection from her secular way of life, and when she saw how important it was to me that she be buried, she agreed.