When Vera Ventura was 14, she ran away from home to live with her sister in New York City. Years later at Skidmore College, she invented her own major, visual anthropology, because no existing program perfectly contained Vera’s eclectic interests. After her diagnosis, she poured her energy into cancer causes, but her top charity of choice was the Guinea Pig Sanctuary in Massachusetts.
I learned these stories only after Vera died in late April, when breast cancer spread into her brain and then thyroid. These stories emerged during the ritual of sitting shiva, a seven-day Jewish mourning period that followed her burial.
Twice a day, at 7 a.m. and again at 7:30 p.m., Vera’s family room — the same room where she hosted my family for Shabbat dinners and where our children played — filled up with Vera’s old classmates, neighbors and friends from synagogue, ready to hold Vera’s husband and children in their loss.
The gathering began with the prayers led by Vera’s husband, Joe, who is studying to be a rabbi. People swayed and shuffled their feet as they whispered prayers in Hebrew and pressed the prayer books to their chests.
During a time of bottomless grief, sitting shiva offered a container for loss, a structure to hold the sorrow and give it shape and voice.
I did not understand the words, but I felt that the ritual anchored my typically frenetic attention in the present moment. It was like stepping into a portal suspended in time, where, away from the world’s demands and chaos, our only purpose was to grieve and to remember.
The evening would then shift into a more informal, conversational portion. Sitting in a circle, visitors shared stories about Vera, sometimes invited to speak by Joe and other times speaking as they felt moved. During shiva, the bits of Vera’s life coalesced into a richer and more textured portrait of a friend who somehow surprised and delighted and inspired even after she was gone.
As I learned more about the rituals and symbols of shiva, I began to see how each part of this tradition transformed grief into a communal and unifying act, a way of insisting to the mourners that in the depths of their sorrow, they don’t have to carry this weight alone.
During a time of bottomless grief, sitting shiva offered a container for loss, a structure to hold the sorrow and give it shape and voice.
My friend Vera
I met Vera the same way I met other close friends during the isolating years of early motherhood: watching our children play at a park in Somerville. Vera was luminous, wearing turquoise feather earrings, a wide-brimmed hat and cowboy boots. For our notoriously cerebral corner of Massachusetts and its completely bland sartorial style, Vera was a bold counterpoint.
After struggling with addiction in her teens and 20s, she approached her health with fierce discipline. She lugged around glass containers with homemade food; for 21 years, she lived without sugar, flour, alcohol and caffeine. She drew immense strength from her 12-step group, often sneaking away during park playdates to join the meetings over the phone in her car.
Vera was Jewish, but her faith and spirituality were not confined to one tradition. She prayed, meditated and led yoga retreats. She searched for God everywhere, and she told me she grew especially close to the divine while living with cancer. We joined her family for Shabbat, which she always began by going around the table to say what each person was grateful for, just like at Thanksgiving. Two of us, a Jew and a Latter-day Saint, especially connected over the shared idea of belonging to a tribe and forging our own mini-tribes with our families.
After she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019, and then brain cancer, she did everything to fight her disease: chemotherapy, double mastectomy, a surgery to remove her brain tumor. She turned to more experimental forms of healing. A few years ago, she had resolved to “starve” her cancer through fasting, sustaining herself only on juice and broth to deprive cancer cells of glucose and to slow their growth. Her longest fasting streak lasted for 67 days, a feat of an unbridled will to keep living.
She documented this fast and her wellness journey meticulously on social media, with honesty and flair. One time, she pretended to pole dance with her IV drip stand, and the nurse had to tell her not to do that. Through documenting her progress and setbacks for the world to see, she wanted her quest for healing to be of use to others — a kind of case study for those going through similar struggles.
For a time, her recovery seemed miraculous, a medical conundrum that doctors couldn’t quite explain. At shiva, friends described her “returning from the dead.” But eventually, the cancer could not be halted or reversed.
Grief, embodied
At the Jewish cemetery outside of Boston, I waited in line for my turn with the shovel. In Jewish tradition, anyone attending the funeral is invited to help fill the grave, a final act of care for the person who died. One by one, we stepped forward and covered Vera’s wooden casket with earth.
I noticed subtle differences in how each person approached the ritual: how deeply they drove the shovel into the earth, how many times they returned for more earth, the way that people positioned the shovel for the next person. We were all saying goodbye, each in our own way.
These are the words shared by the rabbi and the cantor during the service that still echo in my memory: “duet of wonder and grief”; “I am sad and everything is beautiful”; that we all walk and stand in “the valley of the shadow of death,” drawing on Psalm 23.
Shiva began after the funeral at the shul, a Yiddish word for a Jewish synagogue that means “school,” and then continued in the family’s living room. Last December, for Vera’s birthday, in this same room, she gathered a group of women for a sound bath, a sonic experience that involves meditative humming created by brushing against crystal bowls. We laid on the floor and then talked in the circle about how we envisioned our 2026.
On one night when I sat shiva, the same room was filled overwhelmingly with men. Sitting shiva requires gathering a minyan, a quorum of 10 Jewish adults, to recite the prayers. In Orthodox Judaism, the minyan consists of all men.
The act of sitting carried symbolic meaning. Mourners and visitors typically sit on low chairs or stools, lowering themselves physically toward the ground as an expression of grief and humility and as a sign of stepping outside the ordinary hierarchies of life. These physical parts of shiva seemed to pull grief out of its hidden interiors and into a shared and open space, where it can be talked about and embodied by the group.
When grief leaves you incapable of knowing what to do next, it helps to be given something to do — rituals, gestures, symbols that can speak for you when the mind moves slowly and it’s hard to find the right words.
At the center of shiva is the mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer that doesn’t actually mention death directly. It’s a prayer of praising God and inviting peace for people and all Israel. Although I didn’t understand its words during shiva, and only learned about them later, their repetitive cadence and rhythm felt like tapping into the 4,000-year chorus of mourners that have uttered them over centuries. The prayer begins like this: “Magnified and sanctified, may His great name be in the world that He created, as He wills …”
Throughout the week of shiva, visitors entered Vera’s home without knocking, so that the family could be freed from the obligation to greet and host. The mirrors were covered, a form of self-effacement meant to focus fully on the loss, all distractions set aside. Showering, cooking, laundry — all the routine tasks belong in the other reality, not this one. The ordinary rules of life were suspended to make room for grief.
Vera’s husband Joe wore his shirt torn on his chest. When I asked what it meant, he flipped the Torah open to a passage that talked about Job tearing his robe after losing his children and his livelihood. When grief leaves you incapable of knowing what to do next, Joe explained, it helps to be given something to do — rituals, gestures, symbols that can speak for you when the mind moves slowly and it’s hard to find the right words.
The more I learned about shiva, I was struck by how entwined the rhythms of the tradition were with the very practical needs of the mourner. Shiva didn’t treat grief as a disruption to life; instead, it allowed for the darkest and most disorienting feelings to sit at the very center of human experience. As the bereaved surrendered to the tradition, it served them by inviting them to fully let go of their routine responsibilities for seven days, accept meals, shopping trips, extra sleep, anything they needed.
The fragility of human nature and incapacity that comes with grief were not only permitted at shiva — they were welcomed and sanctified.
Strangers connected
I always felt that I occupied an important place in Vera’s life, that I was part of some inner circle of friendship. She was the one to call me, to invite me to some kind of festivity. She made me feel special. But during shiva, I discovered that every person in that room felt the same way I did. The intertwining web of Vera’s friendships was vast — it included me and so many other people I had never met.
As we mourned her, we also came to know her more fully. People asked what Vera was like as a child, how she met her husband, who wanted to get married first. (To my surprise, it was Vera who wanted to take things slow.) We even laughed remembering the more quirky moments — her inflatable Halloween costume or hauling bags of groceries on a scooter.
Discovering the kinship we all shared with one person made me feel a deep sense of sisterhood and brotherhood to people in the room I had never met. They were, in a sense, strangers, but through our shared love for Vera and through our presence there, we were somehow connected.
“She would have loved this,” Joe said one night.
In his book “Kaddish,” American writer and editor Leon Wieseltier writes about his experience reciting the mourner’s Kaddish every day after the death of his father. He talks about the necessity of a complete breaking in mourning.
“There are circumstances that must shatter you; and if you are not shattered, then you have not understood your circumstances,” Wieseltier writes. “In such circumstances, it is a failure for your heart not to break.”
I felt that the ritual of sitting shiva was a gift that made this kind of complete breaking apart fathomable, and even beautiful.
Wieseltier continues, “Transformation must be met with transformation. Where there was the old life, let there be the new life. Do not persevere. Dignify the shock. Sink, so as to rise.”