Her verbal agreement was hardly enough, though, especially since she had granted power of attorney to Bruce, who lived near her; I lived in a different city a considerable distance away. Not certain that Bruce would honor her wishes, I davened every day, for years, that she would be brought to kever Yisrael.

“Did it you write into your will that you want to be buried?” I asked her many times.

“Oh, not yet, I have to get around to it,” she would say each time I reminded her.

In her eighties, she suffered a stroke, which paralyzed her left side and required her to move into a nursing home. The stroke did not affect her cognitive functions, however, and she remained completely lucid despite her physical infirmity.

Once, when I flew in to visit my mother in the nursing home, I asked her if she had managed to add her burial wishes to her will.

“No,” she admitted sheepishly. “But I’ll call in the head staff here and dictate my wishes to them.”

A short while later, the administrator and head nurse of the home entered my mother’s room. “Please write down that I would like to be buried, and not cremated, as per my daughter Sharon’s wishes,” she instructed them. “I also want Sharon to be the one to take care of my burial.”

The administrator wrote down what my mother had said, and she and the head nurse signed the paper as witnesses. I was not present in the room at this time, as I had left in order to give my mother privacy.

After that impromptu meeting, the administrator phoned Bruce. “I’m not sure if you’re aware,” she told him, “but today your mother called me in and left orders that she wants to be buried. Since you have power of attorney, I thought you should be apprised of this development.”

Bruce hit the roof. He called me up and hollered, “What did you do? You bullied Mom into saying she wants to be buried when we both know she really wants to be cremated like her parents! You probably made her so scared that she was forced into dictating that paper!”

“I did nothing of the sort,” I replied. “I wasn’t even in the room when she spoke to the administrator and head nurse. These are her own wishes, expressed of her own volition.”

“Hogwash!” he shouted. “I won’t go along with this! I’m going to fight you in court!”

Unnerved, I looked up the phone number of Rabbi Lemstein, the leading rav in my mother’s city and a renowned halachic authority. I had little hopes of actually reaching him, as he is an exceptionally busy man, but as Hashgachah would have it, he picked up the phone on my first try.

“We have to make sure this issue does not go to court,” he said, after I explained the situation. “In this state, cremation is the norm, and most people here consider burial primitive and outdated. There’s no way you’ll win in court. Can you find a way to talk to your brother and calm him down?”

I was scheduled to fly back home to rejoin my family several days later. Bruce was supposed to drive me to the airport, and before I left, he drove me to the nursing home to say goodbye to my mother, staying out of the room to allow me some private time with her.

Considering the frail state of her health, my mother and I both sensed that this was going to be our last time seeing each other in this world. “Here, Sharon,” she said, handing me her watch and a small bag with some jewelry. “Take this. I don’t need it anymore.”

Then, she looked at me and said, in a tremulous voice, “I haven’t been such a good girl, have I?”

I felt my heart breaking. “Hashem’s shoulders are very wide,” I replied softly. “He can carry a lot of things.”

My voice caught. “Mom,” I said, “how about we say Shema and Vidui together?”

After explaining what Shema and Vidui were, I said the words aloud, and she repeated them after me.

“Will someone say Kaddish for me?” she asked worriedly.

“Of course,” I assured her. “You gave me life, Mom, and you’ll see, my family and I will give you life in the Next World when we say Kaddish and do mitzvos for you.”

At that moment Bruce walked in. In his presence, I asked my mother, “Can you please tell us what you’d like us to do with your body after you pass on?”

“I would like to be buried,” she stated firmly.

“Well,” I said, “Bruce is the one in charge, not me, and he plans to have you cremated.”

She waved her right hand, her good hand, toward Bruce. “Silly boy,” she said. “I don’t want to be cremated.”

Bruce said nothing, but when we reentered his car, he let out another tirade. “You brainwashed Mom!” he shouted. “You made her say that!”

Then he said, in a low voice, “Now that she told me that she wants to be buried, I have to listen to her. But I think you’re just plain wicked for what you’ve done.”

His knuckles were so white as he clutched the steering wheel, I was afraid we’d have an accident. And I knew the battle wasn’t over yet. Bruce had agreed to bury Mom, but I still had to convince him to give her a Jewish burial.

“Bruce,” I said, “it doesn’t really make a difference to you who takes care of Mom once she’s dead, does it? I think it’s better to have Jewish people taking care of her, because they have far more experience with burials than the non-Jewish morticians around here, who perform mostly cremations. I think we should find a Jewish place to handle the burial.”

I didn’t dare say the words chevra kaddisha.

“All right,” he muttered.

When I returned home, I called the rav again, and he assured me that he would tell the local chevra kaddisha to be on alert for a call from the nursing home about my mother. “I’ll make sure they have all the necessary information about her, so that they can take away the body immediately after they get the call.”

Several days later, Bruce called me with some surprising news. “I was going through Mom’s papers,” he said, “and I found a purchase certificate of a burial plot. Apparently she bought herself a plot in the non-denominational section of the local cemetery, near where Grandpa and Granny’s ashes are buried. So maybe she really does want to be buried. She definitely wants to be near her parents. I guess we’ll bury her there, after all.”

That conversation left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, I was relieved that Mom would be buried; on the other hand, I was disturbed that she would not merit a proper kever Yisrael in a Jewish cemetery. Bruce was adamant that my mother be buried near her parents and would not hear of having her buried anywhere else.

When I called Rabbi Lemstein, he told me not to make this a sticking point. “Better that she be buried whole in a non-Jewish cemetery than cremated,” he advised. “It’s not worth antagonizing your brother and risking a cremation.”

The next week, Bruce called again to tell me that he had gone to the cemetery to see the burial plot Mom had purchased. “It’s part of a double plot,” he said, “but the problem is that Mom’s former neighbor, Alberto, is buried in the other side of the plot.”

“Why is that a problem?” I asked.

“Well, I spoke to Alberto’s daughter, and when I told her that we’re planning to put Mom beside her father, she was horrified. She said we can’t do that, it’s immoral.”

“Why?” I wondered. “It’s a separate plot. Six feet under, who cares who her father’s neighbor is?”

“That’s what I told her,” Bruce replied. “But she got really mad and threatened to take me to court if I put Mom beside her father. I’m not interested in starting up with her, and I’ve had enough of this whole burial headache. I’m going to have Mom cremated, as she always said she wanted, and that’s that.”

I was beside myself, and I called the rav for advice. “Can you buy your mother a different burial plot in the same cemetery?” he asked.

“Of course!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t even think of that!”

I called Bruce back. “I thought about it,” I said, “and I realized that it really wouldn’t look right if Mom is buried beside Alberto. I want to pay for a different burial plot for her.”

Bruce checked with the cemetery, and was told that there were plenty of plots available in the area near the grave my mother had purchased. When he told me the price, I immediately transferred that amount into his bank account.

This was on a Friday morning. Motzaei Shabbos, Bruce called to tell me that my mother had died that day, and that the Jewish burial society had come to the nursing home right after Shabbos to take her body. “The nursing home staff was very impressed,” he added. “They asked me who these people are, and they said they’ve never seen a dead person handled with such respect. Usually, the morticians just throw the body into a bag and lug it away.”

My satisfaction upon hearing that was quickly overshadowed by the next words out of his mouth. “I’m planning to hold the funeral a week from Tuesday,” he informed me.

“Why wait so long?” I asked in consternation.

“I can’t get away from work until then,” he said flatly.

Again, I called Rabbi Lemstein. “My mother is in the care of the chevra kaddisha, thankfully,” I said, “but my brother won’t make the levayah until next Tuesday.”

“The main thing is that she’s going to be buried,” he reiterated. “She’s in the hands of the chevra kaddisha, and she’s being held according to halachah. Don’t fight your brother on when or where to hold the funeral.”

Being an onen for ten days and not being allowed to do mitzvos or say brachos was a weird and unnerving experience. Embarrassed by the situation, I did not tell anyone in my community that my mother had died. Tuesday morning, my husband, Daniel, and I flew out to my mother’s city to attend the levayah.

“I don’t want any of those Jewish-looking fellows from the morgue at the funeral,” Bruce informed me. “And I don’t want to see any of those vans with Jewish writing.” I relayed the message to Rabbi Lemstein, who assured me that he would arrange for Bruce’s wishes to be honored. “But you’re going to have to handle the aron inside the cemetery yourselves,” he said, “since the chevra kaddisha is not allowed to bring a niftar into a non-Jewish cemetery.”

The members of the chevra kaddisha drove up to the gates of the cemetery in an unmarked minivan, wearing caps over their yarmulkes instead of black hats.

The cemetery provided us with a gurney, and the four of us — Daniel and I, and Bruce and his son — pushed it along the path toward the graves of Grandpa and Granny, since Bruce wanted my mother “to say goodbye to her parents.”

Upon his insistence, we laid her coffin beside the place where their ashes were buried. “Mom,” Bruce said solemnly, “you’re in front of your parents now.”

“Bruce,” I said, “You don’t believe in this.”

“Well, maybe it’s true,” he reflected.

Daniel bit his lip to hold back his laughter.

From there, we lifted the coffin back onto the gurney and pushed it to the chapel, where the funeral ceremony was to take place. Since we had requested a non-denominational ceremony, the crosses and Christian icons had been temporarily removed from the chapel.

Bruce, who had always been enamored with Hollywood, informed us then that he was envisioning a dramatic entry into the chapel. “Let’s wait outside until everyone else comes,” he said, in a big brother voice. “Then, we’ll open the doors and everyone will file in together.”

“It’s a bit cold out here,” I said. “I think Daniel and I will wait inside.”

I sat down beside my mother’s aron and began saying Tehillim. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I whispered to her, “but this is the first thing I can do for your neshamah at this levayah.”

Eventually, the doors opened and the rest of the funeral procession walked in — a total of 51 people, including Mom’s friends, the nurses from the home, and the director of the cemetery, who commented to me that this was the largest funeral she’d seen in a really long time. “Your mother must have been such a special person,” she remarked.

The funeral ceremony included several eulogies followed by musical selections carefully chosen by Bruce, including church music and a lively rock ‘n’ roll song, which Bruce introduced as “Mom’s favorite song.” After much cringing on my part, we finally proceeded to my mother’s burial plot.

After the coffin was lowered into the grave, everyone besides Daniel and me headed off to a nearby bar for drinks, leaving the refilling of the grave to two cemetery workers who were waiting at the side with a small tractor and some shovels. “It’s important that we be the ones to fill the grave,” Daniel told me quietly, and once all the other participants had left, he asked the workers if we could use their shovels and refill the grave ourselves.

“Oh, that’s our job,” the workers replied. “We’re not allowed to let other people do it.”

Daniel slipped a few green bills into their hands. “Go have yourselves a drink,” he said. “You won’t tell anyone about this, and neither will we.”

They disappeared gleefully, and we got to work filling the grave. Then, we said our goodbyes to my mother and asked her for mechilah.

Finally, I was able to begin shivah. I did not expect to have any visitors in my mother’s city, and I was pleasantly surprised when the woman from the local chevra kaddisha came to see me. She was the second person to tell me, after the petirah, that my mother must have been a special person, which left me perplexed.

My mother was a good person: kind, honest, refined, upstanding. Out of the goodness of her heart, she had taken orphaned or abandoned children into her home well before the institution of foster care formally existed, seeking no remuneration or recognition for it. But she had intermarried, and had not observed an iota of Jewish practice.

In hindsight, however, I recognized that it was largely to her credit that I had embraced Yiddishkeit. Having absorbed her basic values, I never felt comfortable in the secular, mostly amoral, society in which I had grown up. When I met observant Jews for the first time, their values felt comfortable and familiar to me, even if their rituals were completely foreign. I gravitated toward a frum lifestyle because its basic values echoed the ones my mother had instilled in me.

Furthermore, I mused, who can know the significance of a moment of teshuvah? During my final visit with her, my mother had shown clear remorse over her G-dless life, and she had accepted ol malchus Shamayim with her recitation of Shema, followed by Vidui. Plus, she had changed her mind about being cremated, and had gone through the effort of buying herself a burial plot. Who could fathom the value of those actions in Hashem’s eyes?

Daniel and I flew home during shivah, and a stream of friends and neighbors — none of whom knew much about my background — came to be menachem avel. They sat before me with long faces, murmuring words of consolation, while I had to suppress the joy and relief I was feeling over the way my mother’s burial had played out: On Friday, I had arranged with Bruce to buy my mother a new grave, and she had passed away the very next day. It was almost as though she had been waiting for the burial issue to be settled so that her neshamah could safely move on to the next world.

When people inquired, at the shivah, when my mother had died and when she had been buried, I simply responded that she had passed away on Shabbos and been buried on Tuesday. “So long?” they exclaimed. “It’s such tzaar for the niftar not to be buried for three days!”

I refrained from noting that ten days had actually elapsed between the petirah and the burial, as the entire situation was far too complicated to explain. People could make whatever assumptions they wanted about my mother’s burial — and, for that matter, about her entire life. But, as the woman from the chevra kaddisha had attested, my mother, in her death, had possessed an otherworldly glow.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 750)