Steve's Corner
Hello Chevra,
Here is a post-holiday story from Lauren Jackson of The New York Times about a non-Jewish Pennsylvanian who has much to teach us about caring for the dead—and the living. The biblical quotation is mine. We need more people, young and old, like Frankie Halvey:
“Teach us to count our days, that we may obtain a heart of wisdom.”
- Psalms 90:12
The shofar — that curved ram’s horn — is sounding today in synagogues. It’s the second day of Rosh Hashana, the beginning of the year 5787. The ba’alei tekiah, or masters of the blast, will blow 100 sounds in a special pattern throughout morning services.
The horn is intended to be a sort of communal alarm clock. “Awake, you sleepers, from your sleep; rouse yourselves, you slumberers, from your slumber,” Maimonides, the 12th-century Jewish philosopher, instructed. The goal, at the start of this period, known as the Days of Awe, is to awaken to the fact that life is finite.
I want to introduce you to someone who is good at doing that, all the time.
Frankie Halvey spends his days on the leafy, redbrick campus of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He goes to classes for his public health major. He acts onstage for his theater minor. But at night, he leaves his phone on loud — ready to get a call, at any hour, that he needs to go pick up a dead body.
Frankie, at 20, is unusually familiar with death. The son of funeral directors in upstate New York, he worked through the Covid pandemic, when staff members were scarce and calls were not. He grew to appreciate the depth and meaning of the job, the way it let him extend care to people raw with grief. So he sought out similar shifts at college.
As a “transfer team member” at a funeral home, Frankie retrieves the bodies of the recently deceased from homes, hospitals and hospices. As many as four times a night, the phone rings and he pulls himself out of bed, climbs into a van and drives through rolling Amish farmland. He listens to music until he gets close to his destination.
“In the last five minutes of every drive I’ve ever done, I always take a little moment of silence,” he told me, “just to acknowledge the situation that I’m going to be walking into.”
Then he knocks on the door.
Standing there with a stretcher, Frankie will say hello, I’m so sorry for your loss, may I come in, where is your loved one. He tries to intuit what is needed. Sometimes that is silence. Other times people want to talk, and
talk, and talk. They tell him what happened, how long it’s been like this, that they knew the end was coming, that they can’t believe it. Then they tell him stories about their mother’s favorite vacation, or what their father studied in school, or how they are sure their grandma really is with her husband now. Frankie listens, and when the talk tapers, he moves the deceased onto the stretcher. Then, if the body was in a bed, he spends time making it. He tucks the sheets and fluffs the pillows, smooths the duvet and folds the quilt. It’s what he can do, he said, to give the family dignity.
“I actually got that from my parents,” he said.
Once in a while, a bewildered spouse will stop him at the door. “They just ask me to sit in their home with them just so they don’t feel so alone,” he said. “After I leave, that person is probably going to be entirely alone for the rest of the night.”
I was taken by Frankie’s story, and it made me think of a book about the Jewish High Holy Days called “This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared.” The author, Rabbi Alan Lew, writes about those moments of intimate catastrophe that interrupt our hard-wired delusion — that other people will die, but not us. Rabbi Lew argues that the Days of Awe, which stretch between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, are a way to prepare for those moments.
“It’s a dress rehearsal for our death,” he writes of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when God is said to finalize decisions about who will live and who will die in the coming year. “That’s why we wear a kittel, a shroud-like garment, on this day; why we refrain from life-affirming activities such as eating, drinking and procreating. We are rehearsing the day of our death.”
Frankie was raised Catholic and is now a member of an Episcopal church. But his job is also something of a dress rehearsal for the inevitable. He called it a spiritual reminder, one that helps him “try to live a meaningful life where I help others.”
That doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult. “There has never been a time where I’ve really felt great leaving a house call,” he told me. “People can be crying. People can be laughing. You really have no idea what you’re walking into.”
Still, he keeps taking shifts. As we talked about his long nights, I teared up at work thinking of a college student so selfless. It was my own small moment of awe, an example of the Jewish concept of chesed shel emet. That’s Hebrew for true kindness.
L’Shalom, Steve