It is most likely that you think death is contagious. According to old Yiddish custom it might be. After a burial we would leave a cup of water at the doorway. Before entering the house we would rinse our hands clean of it, as if preventing it from seeping in. But the dead soil still clung to our shoes and pant hems. There was no keeping it out. Once it comes, it leaves with company.

But we are Americans here, so there is no need to worry. The silence of it will not infect your brain. The draped mirrors and pale faces will not assuage your vanity. We are all pretty-faced here. I have not seen myself without makeup, let alone shown myself as such, since before I could care. I figured I would even circle the eye with black pencil upon your company. And the color black will be slimming in mourning. My pants will have been washed.

Today is the fifth day of shivah. The silence is almost over now, but we wish it never came and suspect it’ll never really go. In Jewish practice, it is a mitzvah to visit the home of the grieving and offer food. By practice and gravity we cannot make the food ourselves. Making is a distraction. My mother sits on a wooden chair and stares. She sits in my grandmother’s room. With her belongings. She dreads the day we make her clean it out.

It is remarkable, almost disturbing, how quickly the hours slip by when we watch them. There is, you see, nothing else to do but eat and watch them. We allow ourselves no TV, no music, no excess noise until the praying comes towards evening. When family gathers, we chat and reminisce, laugh a little. Alone, we are left to our own devices and regrets, guilt and shame because we could not do more to prevent this, all this, all the silences and stillness. To cope, my mother sorts dishes. My father reads. I guess I write. Some more guilt-ridden than others.

At night, I remind myself that we become spirits and metaphysical beings. The prospect of a reflection tortures me—the possibility of revealing a ghost or shadow present. I would not be capable of handling that shock. So, at night, I acquire unsavory paranoid characteristics. I jerk at sudden sounds and watch the window for any sign of life, or rather death. The first few nights I slept with a light on. It was easy to brush it off as an old bad habit rearing its childish head, falling asleep while reading, the light left on by accident. Indeed I would drift off to the tune of Ginsberg’s Kaddish and later, Didion’s most recent The Year of Magical Thinking. But when the chapter ended, or when my lids were too low to see through, I found safety in the presence of a lamp. That way, they couldn’t get me in the dark.

But all this is neither here nor there. A candle burns in the living room to represent the soul and it’s meant to fade. My grandmother would say in frank Yiddish—dead and buried. And that was what happened to the “soul.”

A few nights back, I talked about god and life with my family: my sister, her husband, and my mother in one room. We must remember there is no need to fear mortality. No logic in doing so. We’re born and we die anyway, whether we fear it or not. My sister asked me this question, it had been plaguing her since that cursed hospital room: What happens to the soul when we die? I argued sincerely. Wholeheartedly, I offered an other dimension, an energy soul, a god energy. We were more than organisms. If only for the fact that we could sit there discussing our nature. And why does it all happen this way? The zygote dividing into cells, the cells differentiating into tissue, the tissue coiling into a mind. And in death the mouth hangs open, a body so still we imagine it still breathing, the chest still waving up and down. So believably that my sister took out her compact and held it to the face, verifying whether it was so. And it was. She said it was like an animal, like a lion lying in a field, dead and gone. The body without life. We were only organisms. Temporary, dying organisms.

By 2 a.m. I had proven otherwise. We came to the conclusion that man was god. Not that men were gods, but that men were god, collectively. And I cited Pi and mathematics, god’s name and perfection, universal laws and paranormal occurrences. I felt good about that conversation, somewhat holier, but mortally afraid of being wrong.

I considered asking the rabbi when he came for services, but they all talked politics. We feed all who come for minyan though we aren’t supposed to. There is wine, vodka, and various Russian delicacies. A temporary hubbub offers hope, or at the least distraction. We gather under any and all circumstances and pray and eat. We say l’chayim before throwing back a shot in celebration of life, in recognition of death, maybe.

But if you eat our food, it’ll only taste alive to you. We only offer very real memories of my grandmother, the deceased, as lively and lifted because she lived that way. And the guilt that haunts laughter and memories in such times will only afflict us, the grieving family, I assure you. Take these flashes of life as you will. Join us in praying if not in mourning. No one is left as empty as my mother. No one can. She left a piece of her heart there in that cursed hospital room, when we turned our backs on a body and left in procession, when she wakes up in the morning anticipating being called.

Don’t worry. If it must, it finds you. This is, after all, still a house of living, though we live in shivah like the ghosts themselves.