{"id":849,"date":"2005-04-14T13:30:56","date_gmt":"2005-04-14T21:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2005\/04\/14\/the-holiness-of-tending-the-dead\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:23:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:23:20","slug":"the-holiness-of-tending-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2005\/04\/14\/the-holiness-of-tending-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"The Holiness of Tending the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I found this moving, and oddly comforting.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We placed a linen cloth over her face, and tied the bonnet on, and then she was a bundled white human-shaped figure: no features, no distinguishing marks, only legs and arms, a torso and a head, a small still white figure. A little awkwardly we lifted her and placed her atop the white sheet we had laid over the plain pine box, and wrapped the sheet over her, and then, suddenly, out of the blue, I was shaking with silent tears. I leaned on the edge of the coffin of a woman I had never known, and understood what we had done for her, and wept and wept.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Rachel Barenblat<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Do read the entire, tender <a href=\"http:\/\/velveteenrabbi.blogs.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/facing_imperman.html\">story<\/a> of her first experience with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zipple.com\/familyandlifecycles\/taharah.shtml\">taharah<\/a>  at her blog, <a href=\"http:\/\/velveteenrabbi.blogs.com\/\">Velveteen Rabbi<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I found this moving, and oddly comforting. We placed a linen cloth over her face, and tied the bonnet on, and then she was a bundled white human-shaped figure: no features, no distinguishing marks, only legs and arms, a torso and a head, a small still white figure. A little awkwardly we lifted her and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,30,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","category-quotes","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12618,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions\/12618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}