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51 The Widow/Widowers Support Group The newly-bereaved gather in the enormous neighborhood synagogue that also houses higher causes. Unmoored, we stray the corridors behind a leader who tries to find an empty room for us so we may begin. An old widower dryly muses on how the Marx Brothers would have choreographed this scene. I will look to him in weeks to come to tell a joke now and then, and he will, as we retell the facts of the weeks just past in which we have all moved shocked out of complacency like survivors of quakes and car wrecks. Why do I go? I don’t share their guilts or their particularities. I meet them here as if on some other plane, where we have become a kinship of magicians who incarnate, alchemists who transfigure, gods who resurrect. Belief is not essential: As soon as the dead are named, they rise and walk among us. ...

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