human touch massage

I have now lost both my parents.

My dad made it to 65, my mom to 82. Of course the loss is never easy for those left behind; though I am grateful they both lived full lives, with much to be grateful for, including each other’s love. And they also each gave a very special gift, something you can really only give once. And something that will help so many others; rather than be buried according to the traditions of the Jewish religion, they gave their bodies to science.

It is such a beautiful gift to give, please try and understand. Let me see if I can help with that…

My parents made this decision, twenty or so years ago. Their decisions to, upon their death, give their bodies to science, rather than be buried. More specifically they had arranged to donate their bodies to the University of California, for medical research. My Dad joked; he always wanted to go to UCLA. When they first told us kids of this decision, like anytime your parents talk to you about their impending doom, we didn’t want to hear about it. “Don’t talk like that”, “You’re not going to die anytime soon”, and then finally “Well, ok, if that is what you really want”. We didn’t really think of the implications.

My father did tell me how he was grateful for modern medical science, which got him an extra 20 years of life, as he saw it. My father had heart disease, diabetes, etc. He had several myocardial infarction’s (heart attacks); each followed with hospital stays and medical care; eventually went through a quadruple bypass procedure, and he was on a host of meds. Having had his first heart attack at the age of 42, and surviving it – my father believed in modern medicine. And it was from this belief that he made his decision. My mother had a background in science herself (a BS in Chemistry from Penn State in the 1940’s!) And despite coming from an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, she had long strayed from being strict about tradition and Jewish law.

My parents actually owned two plots in a local Jewish cemetery; they had bought them many years prior, in an effort to make their passing easier on us. When I was seeking a new career, my dad offered to sell them to pay for my massage school tuition, since they didn’t need them anymore, and he really liked the idea of me being a massage therapist. That was such an amazing gesture to make, and while I considered it, I did not let them actually sell them. My dad didn’t have much at that point in his life, but he was happy to give me what I needed, if he could.

Bert Markovitz

Israel Bert Markovitz passed away in 1993, at the age of 65. I got the call from UCLA Emergency; they found me in the phone book and wanted to know if I was related to Bert Markovitz.

“Yes, that is my father”

“Well sir, he has had a heart attack – can you please come down to UCLA Medical Center right away?”
They were clear to me, not to expect much when I arrived.

My dad knew the symptoms all too well; he had been driving on I-10, pulled over to a call box, and called 911. From where he called, UCLA Medical’s ER was the closest for the ambulance drivers to take him. When I got there, I went to where they had him on life support, lungs and heart… and I knew right then he was not in the body. I don’t know how to explain how I knew, it is a feeling. When I am near the dying, and the recently passed, and I just know where they are. Nothing scientific about it at all, just my perception of where there is energy. Though science confirmed my feelings, the ER Dr.’s more or less told me he was gone, that the machines were simply keeping the systems running. They were asking my permission to turn it all off… and as confident as I was that he was not in the flesh, I couldn’t decide that. It was his wife’s decision.

My mom and sister, an aunt and uncle and some cousins, arrived. My mom said it was ok to turn the machines off, they did, and my father passed away “officially” within an hour. We all went home… and I got a little sleep. My mom went to my sister Beth’s house, and after resting, I went over there to check on her, and to see what arrangements needed to be made. It turns out none. My parents had signed legal documents to give their bodies to the University of California’s Anatomical Donation Program… and my dad died at UCLA. Like I said, he always wanted to go there. And even though he never went much past grade school himself, he was a strong believer in higher education. It was an honor to his spirit to be a part of someone else’s education.

But what about us? My mother, sisters, and I were not religious, for many years, but there are certain traditions the Jewish people follow, rules about burial, methods of mourning, including sitting Shiva for a week after the burial, and others coming to the aid and support of the mourners themselves.
Not only did my Father not want to be buried traditionally, he had also asked us to not have a funeral for him, or sit Shiva. To me personally, he always said “When I go, be thankful for the life I led, and celebrate life. It is a gift, so don’t be sad. Throw a party!”.

My dad had passed away on the eve of a run of Grateful Dead shows, my wife and I had tickets to a 3 day weekend at Shoreline, and then I was going to continue on my own to 3 nights at Cal Expo, and then to a Laguna Seca Daze festival with Phish and The Allman Brothers Band… but who would do that the day after their dad died?

I stayed with my mom throughout the day, family was there as well… and my wife and I conferred, and then checked in with mom. And yes, not only was she OK with us going up to Mountain View to see Jerry Garcia play, she wanted us to go –she knew it was important, and she knew I would get what I needed there from my community. And she agreed Bert would have wanted us to go. And dance, in his honor. Since there was to be no funeral, there was to be no Shiva. We celebrated my dad at Shoreline, and I carried him with me (in spirit) to the following week of shows and festivals. When I returned home, my immediate family, my sisters Bonnie and Beth, my nephew Jason, my wife (at the time) Shelly, my brother Mitchell, and my mom – went to a nice seafood restaurant, talked about dad, and then walked out to the rocks of the jetty in Marina del Rey and cast some flowers to the tide in his memory. He loved the ocean the most. That was it, simple. Honestly, it was all he wanted. So we honored his wishes.

As the time went on though I realized my family missed something… the funeral, the mourning rituals – not about the one who died. It is for the ones left behind, the living. The traditions give us a context to mourn, to process and to heal. In my own way I got a lot of that from my deadhead family when I went to the Dead shows… but I could tell my mom was really hurting, and a more traditional mourning process would have helped her. But she decided she didn’t need it. Tough it out. Be strong, that’s what Bert would have done.
My brother is more religious and observant in his way, a Rastafarian-Jew with a little Hassid and a little Hindu, through in for good measure. He connected with the local Chabad, and proceeded to mourn in a more traditional manor, including attending daily Minyan to recite the Mourners Kaddish. I too had said Kaddish, aloud, and to myself, for my father. But something was missing for me too… and that was the support of a Minyan (ten adult men praying together). So I went with my brother to the Chaba
dnick Shul, and sat through a long Maarev (evening prayer) service. I am not Orthodox, and while I can sort of read Hebrew, and know most of the prayers, Conservative Ashkenazi style, the service was not what I was used too; it was pure davening (praying) and not much English. Still, it was good to be there. When we got to the end, and the Mourners (you are a mourner for one year) rose to say Kaddish, the tears flowed. Something about it, the tradition, or maybe the resonance of the sounds in my chest, or maybe… maybe it was because my Dad had died weeks ago, and this was the first time I prayed in this way with others.

After the service, my brother insisted I speak with the Rabbi. The Rabbi asked about my dad’s passing, asked how my mom was dealing. Asked about me and my wife, and how we were holding up. And then… he explained to me that what we did was “wrong”. He told me that according to Jewish Law, the body is not ours to do with what we please, it is God’s, Ha Shem’s – and it is our duty to treat it as his property, and to return it the way prescribed by Talmudic law and traditions. In other words, he told me we had done a great sin, and that when the age of the Moshiach (messiah) comes, there will be nothing to work with. (And yes, Jews believe in the messiah and an eventual resurrection with eternal life. But that’s a different essay).

Guilt kicks in. I freak out that I did something wrong, and that my father’s soul was lost, and it was my fault. Despite my deep spiritual experience of his being with me during my travels in the week following his death, I somehow now believed we did something wrong. I called UCLA, and it was too late, his body had already been studied and cremated. There were no remains remaining. What they didn’t explain to me was that even if he had not yet been cremated, there was no retrieval available. There was no decision for me to feel guilty about, as the decision was Bert’s while he was alive. He signed a legally binding contract, and there was no way to go against it once he was gone. His body was gifted to UCLA, plain and simple, and it was his gift to give, at least as far as the laws of man go. And his deal with God, is his deal.

I didn’t know that detail yet when I next spoke with the Rabbi, I explained he had been cremated, which is again against tradition. The Rabbi made “tsk” sounds and rolled his eyes in disbelief. He was saying we did something very wrong, and he didn’t know what we could do to change it. He and my brother had actually upset my mother with this too… and she was in enough pain, without having to believe she had sinned against my father’s very soul. I took the rabbinical approach, deciding to discuss, argue, logic with the Rabbi. While I am not a student of Talmud, I know a bit more about Judaism than most assimilated American Jews. We talked of tradition versus science. He was obviously a “creationist”, my mere reference to humans being an evolved animal species upset him. I pointed his eyeglasses out, and he said he was not against using medical advances, we should take medicine if needed, or get a surgery, but he was against putting Science before Religion and kept coming back to the fact that the body was God’s not ours to do with what we please.
Finally I said, ‘One of the ten commandments is to honor our Mother and Father. I honored my Father’s wishes’.

He thought silently for a few minutes, then came back with “There is room in Talmudic logic for the person who commits a grave sin, but in his heart of hearts believes he was doing something righteous – and doing the right thing. So from that perspective, what you did is acceptable, since you thought you were honoring your Fathers wishes” – I think this was Jewish Absolution for my sins, or something similar. It helped me feel better, and it gave the Rabbi, and my brother some peace about the matter. I shared with my mother the Rabbi’s conclusion, and she said “Good”. She was missing Bert, and didn’t want any more tsuris about it.

In the year after my Fathers passing, my older sister passed away, much more tragically and way too young, and it hurt worse than anything. We had the plot my Father hadn’t used, and we buried my sister Beth in 1994. We had a more traditional funeral, my loving cousins provided us a space to gather and mourn after her passing. And my mom moved in with me, for a short while, then got an apartment on her own for a couple years. I won’t give you the whole history, but I will say that this was harder on my mom than my father’s passing. And I think it is better that we buried my sister, and had a funeral, for our sake.

Mom eventually moved to Santa Rosa, to live with my younger sister Bonnie. While in Santa Rosa, Belle became part of a new synagogue, Congregation Shomrei Torah. A Reform Shul, she would sometimes laugh at their ways of doing things (she was raised Orthodox, and raised us Conservative, and this was a Reform congregation). Still, she got support and friendship of a community for many years, and they were there for her and my sister to recite Mourner’s Kaddish with on the date of Bert’s and Beth’s Yartziet’s (anniversary of death). And Rabbi George became a friend of hers, and the congregation adored her.

And me, I went to massage school, in 1995. I paid my own way, without selling the family plot. The school had a skeleton, a real one. We call him Casper, and he is both an incredible learning aid and the school mascot. We talk to him, and about him. We care about Casper, some people have put some jewelry on him, occasionally a scarf or hat. And when he needed some repairs to his fragile structure, a loving student took him home and patched his bones. I even set him up with a Facebook page of his own!
Casper is from India, and may not have volunteered for his position of hanging around our school; as I understand it, he was a gift to the school many years ago, and had been in other educational use prior to that. But where he came from (we know India, but nothing else), when he died, and if he volunteered to donate his body is unknown. Casper was one of my greatest teachers. In order for me to really understand the structure of the body, the connections of joints, the brilliant design that is the human skeletal structure, I studied Casper. Did you know the proximal epiphysis of the radius is round like a wheel, and sits in a “wheel well” like nook of the ulna, and this enables pronation of the forearm? It’s one thing to read that, it is another thing to see it. I have Casper to thank for that.

Casper is dead, long ago. There is no life energy that I can feel in his body, and I have touched all his bones at some time over the last 15 years. And yet, it has never escaped me that this was a man, a son, a brother, a friend, a lover, and maybe somebody’s father. I always treat him with love and respect, never forgetting that he is not just a body, he was somebody’s…
And it is not just a visual learning aid… as a massage therapist I touch the body of my clients, and I need to know where I am. The bony landmarks, the places where muscles attach, the way things are made to move… I learned much of this hands-on, with Casper, as well as live subjects. I am very accurate with my touch, which my clients appreciate very much. I attribute that to my passion for anatomy, as well as the experience I have had developing my skills of palpation, relating the bony protrusions and surfaces I felt through skin and muscle, to the ones I saw and touched on Casper. Most every body has the same parts (with some variation), and Casper’s body helped me learn the map. And doctors, surgeons, nurses, chiropractors and other healers all learn from real cadavers and skeletons too.

I eventually became a teacher at the same school I studied at, and for ten years taught massage and tai chi and anatomy. I never forgot my Fathers willingness to sell his plot to send me there, and I knew he would have
been very happy with the path I was on. I never forgot his gift, and even though they had told me his remains had been cremated, I always wondered if anything was preserved. Even pictures – and that someone was using, learning to help the living, by studying from my Dad, as I studied, and helped others learn, from my friend Casper. Doctors, nurses, chiropractors, therapists, medical researchers – healers all learn from a gift like my Dad’s, and they use what they learn to help ease the pain and suffering of so many others. And isn’t that the best thing you can do?

I spoke with my mom over the years, and about how the mourning was cut short for us, and that was the one thing Dad had wrong… he was right that we should celebrate life, and right in giving his gift. But… we have to mourn, we have to be sad. There is no denying it, or there is, but it is unhealthy to do so. I never asked her to change her mind though about her donation. And I told her about Casper.

Belle Markovitz

My mom, Belle Markovitz, passed away on June 20, 2010 , right before the day with the most light. She had been in decline for a while, having had major heart surgery in 2008, and suffering the onset of dementia and other signs of age. Of course, none of this was apparent until mom turned 80. She was working, and vibrant and busy up until then.

I’d visit when I could after her move north, and always tried to have fun with her. I even took my mom to see a show, Bob Dylan and Phil Lesh and Friends at Concord Pavilion in 2000. She had fun, though she said she was only dancing to keep warm. As someone pointed out recently, what a nice way to keep warm! She loved telling (shocking) the other seniors about going to see a “Grateful Dead” concert. She was fascinated to see my world (she had heard all about it for so long). Belle was a closet Deadhead. She knew a lot about the band from me, and told me she loved when the local radio station played their “Daily Dose of The Dead”. And she would start conversations with people wearing Dead shirts, and always had the latest scoop on the band members to share (which she got from me!)

We never spoke about changing the donation, though I told my mom that we would have a memorial for her, that we would need it. When my sister called me with the sad news, and I in turn called my brother, and others, everyone asked about the funeral. I said I didn’t know… my mom did have a plot in Southern California, but also had made an arrangement with UC. What I didn’t understand – though my sister did tell me on her initial call – is that the deal was done. UCSF sent people to pick up my mother’s body. She died peacefully, in her sleep, shortly after a nice dinner with my sister. Bonnie discovered her a couple hours later, and called 911, though I think she knew it was too late. Bonnie had told me the people from UCSF had come to pick her up, and I misunderstood at first, thinking she had fallen out of bed. I was, in shock, and the information was not making sense to me yet.

When I arrived the next morning, I asked Bonnie for clarification and she said they (the team from UCSF) had already been there and took her away. It was ok, I didn’t need to see the body. My sister had been Belle’s caretaker intensely for the last 2 ½ years since the heart surgery, and it must have been very difficult for her, to see – but also helped make it real. Mom was gone. And there were no further arrangements to be made. I read a brochure on the table about the Anatomical Donation program, and understood a few things better. It was her gift to give, and only her decision could rescind that gift. Nothing I could do, even if I wanted too. My mom, and dad had in their full capacity and right mind, made this decision. I will honor the wishes of my mother and father, and accept that the decision was all theirs. There was nothing any of us did wrong, and nothing anyone could make us feel guilty about.

Part of the burial tradition is the shoveling of dirt into the grave. It is very cathartic, and helps to make it real. We won’t have that, but we will have a memorial service, in a Shul, and we will say Kaddish. And our hearts are heavy with the loss, though we have solace in the thought of how full mom’s life was, and how relatively short her time of suffering and decline were. We are not burdened by the expense of a funeral, and the beautiful community she was part of at Congregation Shomrei Torah will be there to support us at the memorial, along with the family members that can make the journey to Santa Rosa.

And my mom has made a beautiful gift. A gift to countless others, a gift that can help healers learn how to help others suffer less. And not only will I not feel guilty for not following a tradition, I am elated by her giving back. It’s the body, it’s not the person. My mom is with me in my heart, and her spirit is with God forever – and as my Jewish upbringing taught me, the Lord is one. There is no separation; I can feel these things. Many others will benefit from her giving of herself in this way. She always had a lot to give.

I think I’ll do the same.

“And it’s just a box of rain
I don’t know who put it there…
Believe it if you need it,
Or leave it if you dare.
And it’s just a box of rain,
or a ribbon for your hair…
Such a long long to time to be gone,
And a short time to be… there.”

For more information on Anatomical Donation: http://www.ucop.edu/hss/adprogram/

Sunrise I-5 6/24/2010
I can see the light between me and my mind
I can feel memories fall behind
And the light is growing brighter now
And the light is growing brighter now