Death is a sub­ject none of us wants to spend too long on. When we attend funer­als, it’s chal­leng­ing to find the right words of com­fort, and when we expe­ri­ence deep, per­son­al bereave­ments, we are flung into an abyss that forces us to con­front our own mor­tal­i­ty — some­thing most of us would pre­fer to avoid. In Liv­ing with Our Dead, a book writ­ten in French and beau­ti­ful­ly trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish, Del­phine Horvilleur con­fronts these sub­jects head-on. As a rab­bi fre­quent­ly called on to offi­ci­ate at Jew­ish funer­als, Horvilleur’s expe­ri­ence with grave­side suf­fer­ing is exten­sive, and her insights, profound. 

On par­ents who have lost a child, Horvilleur writes: ​“The death of a child con­demns you to exile in a land where no one can vis­it, apart from those to whom the same thing has hap­pened. Like all immi­grants, you’ll have to dis­cov­er a new lan­guage. None of the words you know can begin to describe what you will have to live.” The Parisian rab­bi also notes how our con­ver­sa­tions change when some­one we know is suf­fer­ing from a life-threat­en­ing ill­ness. ​“Your loved ones con­tin­ue to talk to you, but, with­out your knowl­edge, they gen­er­al­ly start anoth­er con­ver­sa­tion in your absence with your hus­band, your wife, your clos­est cir­cle. Your health becomes a sub­ject of con­ver­sa­tion that escapes you. [This] is sim­ply the main side effect of the most shared emo­tion in the world: fear.” 

Horvilleur gives us case stud­ies from the indi­vid­u­als she’s encoun­tered and the funer­als she’s offi­ci­at­ed. There’s Elsa Cay­at, a psy­cho­an­a­lyst who was mur­dered in the Char­lie Heb­do shoot­ing, and her close friend, Ari­ane, a young moth­er whose ill­ness Horvilleur wit­nessed from its start to its dev­as­tat­ing end. She recounts the assas­si­na­tion of Yitzhak Rabin, which took place when she her­self lived in Israel. And she gives us a humor­ous glimpse of Miri­am, a New York senior she knew who was so obsessed with the plan­ning of her own funer­al that her fam­i­ly mem­bers arranged a staged event for her in advance of her death, so she could enjoy it well before she died. Horvilleur also goes back in time to dis­cuss the death of Abra­ham, our fore­fa­ther, and the demise of the Jews of Alsace – Lor­raine, some of whom were her own ancestors. 

Read­ers will find Liv­ing with Our Dead full of prag­mat­ic insights and moments they will rec­og­nize well from their expe­ri­ences as mourn­ers and com­forters alike.