Shiva (from the Hebrew for seven) is the first and most intense stage of Jewish mourning, the seven days beginning at burial observed by a person's parents, children, siblings and spouse. The mourners remain at home and are visited there; they sit low, cover the mirrors, refrain from work, bathing for pleasure, wearing leather shoes, cutting hair and marital relations, and do not greet or occupy themselves with ordinary life. The community comes to them, forms a prayer quorum in the house so that the mourner can say the Kaddish, and brings the meal of consolation.
The structure is deliberately graded. Shiva gives way to shloshim, the thirty days during which the mourner returns to work but still avoids celebration, and for a parent mourning continues for a full year. The design places the sharpest restriction closest to the loss and eases it in stages, and its governing principle, expressed in the custom that visitors do not speak until the mourner does, is that the bereaved are to be accompanied rather than distracted, the ordinary world held at a distance until they are ready to re-enter it.