I find it strange that both the author and Z argue that Jewish death and dying rituals seem to focus on the living rather than the dead.  I am a Jew, formerly a Catholic, and my first impression about the difference between Christian funerals (and that truly hideous tradition, the open-casket "wake") and Jewish funerals was that no one at a Jewish funeral could deny that a human being who had touched the lives of other human beings had died.  Shoveling dirt into a grave, hearing the thud of the earth on the coffin, taught me more about my own mortality than looking at a grotesquely made-up dead body surrounded by stinking flowers and hearing people say, "She looks like she's sleeping...."