Unveiling a Monument, Building a Memory

Although I am a rabbi now, I did not grow up in a family that practiced. My first experiences with unveilings were ones I did myself, following what I had learned in rabbinical school and from Rabbis Manuals.

Now, I am a hospice chaplain, and a few weeks ago, I accompanied a family member to the gravestone cutters to support her in choosing the design for her husband’s tombstone. She had chosen the color and type of stone, she had pondered over design and the placement and form of Jewish star, interlaced or solid, etc. And then, most difficult, was the arrangement of the names of the three people: her husband, her father in law’s ashes, and her own name with her birthdate, leaving an empty spot for the date of her death. There were joking words with the sales person about being careful, as this was for “all eternity,” and suddenly I found myself choking up, reaching out a hand to comfort my client, who responded, “I’M ok…how are YOU?”

I had always likened the unveiling to be similar to that scene in A Christmas Carol when the ghost of Christmas future takes Scrooge out and shows him his own tombstone in the cemetery.

Indeed, this ritual does mark another step in the journey of grieving that brings home the reality of loss, for all eternity, of a loved one: the dramatic moment when we pull away the cloth covering the stone, and there it is: the name of one so dear to us, in stone.

Later on that day, when we went to see the spot where the marker was to be placed, after having been engraved, we walked for a while in the cemetery. As we got into our cars to leave, suddenly she pointed a finger across the street and said, “There’s my grandmother! I knew she was somewhere in this area, but I never found her before!” Many stories poured forth of her grandparents, their immigrant experience, their finding their way to San Francisco, the small part they played in the building the city what it is today. “Aren’t cemeteries wonderful?” I said, and she agreed. They are not only monuments to loss, but to life that has been lived, reminders of history, of individual and family stories, preserved in those stones. They are places to reminisce, places of memory, of cherishing and closeness, places to teach and give context to a family’s thread of history in the great Mythic story of a people.

Me’irah Iliinsky is a Reconstructionist rabbi, as well as an artist. She works as a hospice chaplain for Vitas Healthcare in the San Francisco Bay region and teaches Torah at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Her artwork can be viewed at