On Sunday, I attended a memorial service for a deceased neighbor whose family could not have a proper Jewish service due to COVID gathering restrictions. Ruth would have turned 85 years old yesterday. The outdoor service, situated next to Ruth’s headstone and that of her husband who had died 106 weeks earlier, started with a Rabbi reading Psalm 23 in English and Hebrew. I find this Psalm quite comforting. The Rabbi spoke of his fondness of etymology and the eldest son spoke for 20 minutes.
I chatted often with Ruth and her husband during dog walks. They met at Northwestern University and in the fall we would talk about college football. Ruth once spoke enthusiastically about her 2018 trip with said son to San Diego to see her beloved Wildcats defeat the Utah Utes 31-20 in a New Year’s eve bowl game that had officially become the San Diego County Credit Union Holiday Bowl.
After the service I drove around a portion of the cemetery. The oldest headstone I found had a date of 1921. Ruth was buried in a large Jewish section. The Muslim section, i.e., the “Bosnian American Cultural Association” area, was adjacent to deceased Jews. Christians marked by a cross appeared in other areas. A small section of Asians existed. Of course, headstones recognized nonreligious persons too. For example, I found the gravestone of a former Northwestern professor who specialized in labor economics and won a Nobel prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_T._Mortensen . Professor Mortensen was born in Enterprise, Oregon. He received his BA in economics from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
Jew, Muslim, Christian, and people who do not identify with either of the three Abrahamic faiths all rest within walking distance of each other, and all are part of the human race.
While I imagine the corpse of a burned Black Man after being lynched or the charred Iraqi after being murdered by white phosphorus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pHUC-qy7rI would have unimaginable odor, any other corpse of the one race, the human race, smells the same.
