In ancient times, the body was said to be controlled by four humours, related to the body fluids blood (sanguine/red), phlegm (phlegmatic), yellow bile (choleric), and black bile (melancholy). In addition to predisposition to certain diseases, an excess of one or another humor was associated with a particular appearance, personality, and/or personality disorder. While the theory is long discredited, the descriptions carry through to today: a sanguine personality is friendly and outgoing; a phlegmatic one, slow-moving or lazy; a choleric one, quick to anger; and a melancholic one, prone to sadness, discontent, or depression. (Interestingly, I haven't been able to find a relationship between diabetes — either major type — and an imbalance of one or more humours.)

Black is also, in many European traditions, the color of mourning. (In some Asian traditions, the color of mourning is white.) Black bile, black cloth, melancholy... and therefore, the modern "black humor" — witticisms and jokes about death.

In the Jewish tradition, our dead are buried within a day of dying, except that if they die too late to be buried before sunset on Friday, their interment must wait until Sunday. The following week is the period of heaviest mourning, called shiva (sounds like a New Englander saying "shiver"), in which prayers for the departed soul are said morning and evening.

Because Mom was a retired government employee, and because my sister and I don't have the funds to pay for her plot (everything else was paid in advance), we have to wait for the government to process her life insurance before we can bury her. My best definition for this is, "If you make your living working for the government, you make your death at the speed of that government." The "joke" is a bit more succinct than that, but basically, civil government has once again supplanted religion in our lives.

The result is that, though Mom died last Saturday night, the earliest we'll be able to bury her is Sunday. If we can't do that, we may have to wait for Tuesday — more than a week after her passing. It seems a bit ironic: we're supposed to sit shiva after the body is buried, not before. I'm not sure when Kaddish is supposed to start, so I haven't been saying it (not that I have a minyan to pray with); I can only hope that the folk who are paid to watch over the unburied Jewish dead have said, or are saying, the appropriate prayers. (Or, I can ignore the religious aspects for the practical ones — which is largely what I've been doing.)

One of the biggest practical aspects is sorting through at least the portions of the apartment where the remainder of my stuff-in-Queens is. I've been wearing work clothes — the modern-day equivalent of "sack cloth" — and getting covered in ash-gray dust. From which I surmise that the modern equivalent of "sack cloth and ashes" is "work clothes and dust".

I'm generally not a fan of black humor, so my analyses and analogies are typical only of my mind's ability to see patterns — not my overall sense of humor. Unless "black humor" is synonymous with "coping mechanism"...

Otherwise, instead of the "waiting for death" when someone is terminally ill, we're still waiting for burial. It's no less difficult.