Book by local author celebrates 10th anniversary with unanticipated COVID audience

“On its 10th publication anniversary, ‘Saying Goodbye to Someone You Love: Your Emotional Journey Through End of Life and Grief’ serves an unanticipated audience: the grieving families of the over 100,000 COVID-19 victims,” said Las Cruces author and folklorist Norine Dresser.

Dresser wrote the book with bereavement specialist Fredda Wasserman, and it was selected as a best self-help book by Library Journal in 2010.

“While talking about death used to be taboo, now it is the lead story in the media as we are bombarded with the latest statistics about hospitalizations and deaths,” she said.

“My attitude toward death was jolted when, as a folklorist and university professor, I attended a traditional Mexican Day of the Dead celebration,” Dresser said in the book’s preface. “The ceremony [involved] a procession several blocks long of costumed skeletons, ghouls and ghosts of famous people. The parade ended … a giant altar that held miniature coffins, skeletons and spun-sugar candied skulls with names of people in colorful icing. What really stood out was a life-size cardboard coffin on the floor with a drawstring at the end. Tentatively, children approached and pulled on the string, which caused the upper half of the coffin to open – and up popped a skeleton. Screaming, the children ran away, gathered their courage and returned to pull the string again.

“How healthy, I thought, to play with the artifacts of death.

“[When] my husband of more than 50 years became terminally ill, caring for him in hospice while he slowly deteriorated over the course of a year challenged my ideas. Nonetheless, living so close to death reinforced the beliefs I had developed since attending that first Day of the Dead celebration.”

Dresser moved to Las Cruces in 2012. She has written a number of other books, including “Come as You Aren’t! Feeling at Home with Multicultural Celebrations” (2006), “Multicultural Manners: Essential Rules of Etiquette for the 21^st Century/More Real-Life Dilemmas with Special Emphasis on Post 9/11 Conflicts” and “American Vampires: Fans, Victims, Practitioners” (1989).

You can buy her books at at independent bookstores and online. Visit www.norinedresser.org/.

Sharing a vigil

By Norine Dresser

I feel so helpless during this COVID-19 outbreak. I am horrified by the accelerating numbers of infections and deaths. Besides trying to keep myself healthy and avoid spreading the virus, what can I do to help?

Physical limitations prevent me from volunteering, for example, at food banks. I have donated money to hard-hit communities, like the nearby Navajo Nation and to local charities. But writing a check is not enough.

My solution arrived in the form of a recent email from Rabbi Regina Sandler-Phillips. Over 10 years ago, I interviewed her for a book I co-authored called “Saying Goodbye to Someone You Love: Your Emotional Journey Through End of Life and Grief.” (New York: Demos, 2010.)

She expanded my knowledge about the Jewish tradition of preparing bodies for burial. Now she is involved with an interfaith organization that spiritually stays with the rapidly accumulating bodies in New York, and elsewhere in the world, until they are finally laid to rest.

Sandler-Phillips participates in an interfaith organization called, Sharing a Vigil for the COVID-19 Dead. Volunteers take shifts to focus on the dead while saying prayers, reciting poems, reading literature, playing music or even remaining silent. This remote vigil-keeping is a way to bear witness and extend ultimate kindness to ALL dead – near and far, whether named or unknown.

When the Rabbi asked for volunteers, I signed up. I told her that every night in Las Cruces, 11 p.m. until midnight, I would sing songs and accompany myself on the ukulele, while concentrating on the bodies elsewhere. Given the dire predictions about second waves of infection, this job will no doubt last for months, even longer.

Ordinarily, around 10:30 p.m., I am either at my computer in my office or streaming TV in the living room. I turn off the electronics and enter my bedroom for nightly ablutions before changing into my bedclothes.

At precisely 11 p.m., I begin to sing and play while I visually focus on a sight that will never leave me — in New York City, large white refrigerated trucks, temporary morgues, that are crammed with bodies awaiting their final disposition. The thought of these lonely crowded bodies fills me with great sadness.

For one hour, I sing.

This new and moving experience satisfies my need to meaningfully participate in one of the most horrendous events of a lifetime.

  Norine Dresser is a folklorist who strongly disagrees with those who want to end the corona virus lockdown and reopen businesses prematurely.