Delayed/withheld Notification of Death
In the event that due to circumstances that prevent communication, one cannot be notified of a close relative's death in a timely manner, and then one learns of a relative's death following burial, Shiva starts on the day of notification, and ends when other relatives finish Shiva. No make-up days are required.
If one learns of a relative's death more than a week following burial, s/he shall sit Shiva starting on the day of notification, if the shloshim period has not elapsed. Shiva shall be a seven-day period, unless the shloshim period ends during this time, or a Yom Tov begins.
If the shloshim period has elapsed, Shiva is not observed. But if the deceased relative is a parent, the recitation of kaddish and yearlong restrictions are in effect.
If one cannot be notified of a relative's death due to mental health deficiencies that make it impossible to comprehend the loss or physical illness that may be severely aggravated by hearing the news, notification is withheld, and the person does not sit shiva.
Read more about this topic: Shiva (Judaism)
Famous quotes containing the words delayed, withheld and/or death:
“When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.””
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 32:1.
“Unlike Freud, Jung did not believe that a dream is a mask for a meaning already known but deceitfully withheld from the conscious mind. In his view, dreams were communication, ideas expressed not always straightforwardly, but in the best way possible within the limits of the medium. Dreaming, in Jung’s psychology, is a constructive process.”
—Jeremy Campbell (b. 1931)
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)