‘Ephraim will know': the man who buried 10,000 people has lessons on empathy, loss and the majesty of memory

The Guardian

12 hours ago

It's a cool summer morning in the last days of 1959 and a teenager is riding his bike through Sydney's Rookwood cemetery. As he glides across the grounds, he notices the signs of dawn. The dew is melting off the grass. A fox leaps behind a bunya pine, and as if out of nowhere, a few of its cubs follow. The soil is firm beneath his tyres, and he can smell it warming, roused by the sun after a night of slumber.
Riding his Malvern Star, he is carefree. But Geoffrey William Finch, this lanky not-quite-man on his way to his carpentry job, is also careful. As he traverses the grounds, he sees the sun come up behind the headstones. Then he rounds a corner and sees the very same sun shining on an east-facing row, blazing into the engraved names of the dead.
This morning, as every weekday morning, he could circumvent the cemetery, ride along the waking bustle of Lidcombe. Instead, he lets himself in through the pedestrian gate and cuts across the field of headstones. He chooses this route because he likes the quiet. This is the interlude in which he works out his world, considers the day to come.
'And the whole time I am talking,' he tells me, some six decades later, sitting at his broad dining table in Melbourne.
'Who are you talking to, Ephraim?' I ask, because now this boy is an elderly man with a different name, a different religion, a life that he could have scarcely predicted riding through Rookwood on those dewy mornings. Ephraim and I are sitting in his front room and the sun is pouring into the space between us.
He is telling me stories. I notice that he prefers discussing his work to discussing himself. He wants to revisit his 30 years as director of a burial society – the people he comforted and held; those he ritually washed, wrapped and prayed for. But today I press him on those early years. I want to learn the soil of this man before I can describe its trees, the fruits it has borne.
'Who are you talking to, riding through Rookwood?' I repeat, lightly, as Ephraim closes his eyes, slipping into a temporal estuary. 'I am talking to God,' he says eventually, his hands resting on the table in front of him, a boyish smile now playing on his bearded face. That Ephraim says such a lofty thing without an ounce of grandiosity, without pushing or preaching, foreshadows what I will learn about this man. This man, at once deeply religious and utterly irreverent, softly spoken but defiant, is as prone to crying as to smiling. This man, whose work deals with the body as much as the spirit, dwells easefully at their intersections. This ageing Orthodox Jew with a broad Aussie accent, this voracious archivist and beloved community figure, this working-class butcher's son who felt pulled to the Torah, is, himself, many beautiful intersections.
The notion of writing Ephraim's life has been in the ether for many years. If you were a member of Melbourne's Jewish community from the mid-1980s to 2015 you would – for better or worse – have had something to do with Ephraim Finch. Having buried over 10,000 individuals, Ephraim is – physically, emotionally, culturally and spiritually – linked to a great many lives in this unique pocket of the world.
Not long ago, someone interviewed Ephraim with a view to writing his biography. But for one reason or another, a book did not eventuate. And so the idea made its way to my desk.
A week after the publisher approached me, I was shown Ephraim's journal. I was struck by the language he used to chronicle his work with the dead and the dying, as well as their loved ones: 'Your heart could feel the pain of lovers separated by war.'
'How do you live a normal life? I don't know, but I feel their losses and their love for each other.'
'Sometimes you do not understand the depth of friendship until the final days.'
I noticed his empathy for all those enduring loss. The intensely personal involvement with the details of another's narrative. The reverence for forces we battle but must ultimately accept. 'He knew he was going to die and seemed to accept it. I held his hand and wished him a safe journey,' he writes in one entry. I wanted to know more about this heart language and how a human might acquire it, become fluent in its lexicon.
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Underneath this sat something else. I had my own memory of Ephraim Finch, from a death in my family almost 20 years ago. When my then-husband's mother passed away in 2006, I remember Ephraim's name being uttered; on the cusp of her death, throughout her funeral, during the rituals that coloured the subsequent weeks. I do not recall the way Ephraim looked, or even meeting him. But I will never forget the way his name resonated in that house of mourning. It was as though the name itself had a beneficent forcefield; every time my grief-stricken father-in-law would say it, he seemed calmer. 'Ephraim will know' seemed to be the answer to the questions, many of them unanswerable. Time after time, in the sheer act of saying it, something in the atmosphere would ease, even as the tears continued. When the name 'Ephraim Finch' was spoken to me again, some 17 years later, I felt myself hurtling, with grateful awe, back into its orbit.
At our first meeting, before I have even begun to prepare myself for the flood of names and narratives, Ephraim launches into a recollection of everyone he continues to visit at Springvale Jewish cemetery, almost 10 years after retirement from his role as director of the Jewish burial society. 'It's my village,' he says, closing his eyes and taking me along on his imaginary tour of the place. 'I see all of them as I go around … it's like walking down the street. There is the lovely gentleman who descended from the Radomsker Rebbe, and there is Bill … Hello Bill, my dear friend! And here is Mr Cykiert, who gave me his poem just before he passed.' I continue to watch him meet them, one by one.
'And, oh.' He drops to a whisper, his fluttering hands stilling. 'Hello, dear boy.' Something subtle shifts in his facial musculature, his eyes flicker. 'You see, I buried this boy …'
In this moment, Ephraim's wife Cas, who has been sitting with us the entire time, softly interjects. 'May I tell this story, darling?' she asks, in a manner I will witness many times over the coming months. There is a concert of silent knowings between Cas and Ephraim, an instinct for each other's pauses. Intuitively, they allocate the best raconteur for the moment, illuminating and verifying one another. 'I'd like to explain why we are so connected to this boy, if I may?' Cas asks, her voice deep and low, her blue eyes cloudy. Ephraim nods.
'We were out one day with our daughter Sharona, who is now 42, but was then 20. It was a hot day, but she was suddenly freezing and had a terrible headache. This went on for days and on the third night she developed a rash. On top of this, she felt like every bone in her body was breaking. Next morning, I got up at dawn to get her some Panadeine. As soon as my finger made contact with her arm, dark purple spots started to appear, spreading. And Ephraim knew exactly what it was, because he had buried this magnificent young man a few years earlier. He knew the symptoms.'
A doctor arrived not long after and administered a penicillin shot, which bought Sharona time to get to the hospital, where she would stay for three weeks. One day an infectious diseases doctor approached the Finches on the ward.
'How did you recognise the meningococcal septicaemia?' he asked Ephraim.
'Doctor, I buried a boy in 1991 …' And before Ephraim could say more the doctor named that boy, remembering the family. They stood mutely for some time, struck by the reach of tragedy. But beneath the moment was an undertow, a twist in the Finches' hearts. It was nothing as crass or numerical as a sacrifice schema – Cas and Ephraim never believed that this boy died so Sharona could live. In fact, it was an inversion of this 'lucky us' smugness – they had never forgotten that this child died while theirs had lived.
Three months after Cas tells this story, Ephraim and I will go to Springvale together, and when we reach this young man's grave, Ephraim will bend down and kiss the engraved marble. He will greet the boy and read his name out loud, along with his date of passing. He will intone the names of his mother and father. He will weep for them, while knowing the limits of his weeping. He will continue bending, head bowed, holding all the connections in all his body. And I sense, simply by being next to this softly moving human, the shuddering proximity between us all, the near misses, the churn of loss and the majesty of memory, the ceaseless current of our arrivals and departures.
This is an edited extract from Ferryman: The Life and Deathwork of Ephraim Finch by Katia Ariel (Wild Dingo Press, A$34.99).