How best to say goodbye
By Joe Horgan
I would guess that anthropologists and assorted academics learn an awful lot about societies by the way they bury their dead.
How people collectively mourn and grieve, celebrate a life remembered or simply deal with the unavoidable finality of being mortal shows us much about who they are. How a society copes with death tells us much about how they cope with life.
On more than one occasion I have heard the Irish described as death-obsessed, and certainly death is present in Irish society in a way in which it is not in British society. A huge attendance at funerals in rural Ireland is a commonplace. Snake lines of people queue outside the funeral home, traffic has to inch its way past, sometimes the gardai patrol the road. The bells toll over the town. Death is very visible in Ireland.
I remember someone who had arrived to live in Ireland with no previous Irish connections saying to me once that she initially thought the death rate here must be very high, such was the number of funerals she came across and was suddenly attending. It took her a while to realise that it was just that funerals were not hidden away.
A funeral here is usually a three-day affair with the Rosary, followed by the removal, followed by the funeral mass itself. When my grandmother died the family kept her overnight in the house for the Rosary and sat up with her throughout that night. The next day she went to the funeral home where more people came to pay their respects and then she was removed to the Church where she spent her last night before being buried the next day. A full three-day ritual of mourning and waking was observed. Like many things in Ireland the way her death was dealt with felt timeless. Perhaps in death at least the pace and rhythm of an older, more venerable Ireland is maintained.
The first thing many Irish people do in the morning is to check the death columns of the paper. Again, it is as if some older pattern of a society remains here in that people will journey across many miles of Irish countryside to attend the funeral of someone they know. The old family links become visible at such times as people separated by 60 or 70 miles feel the pull of a connection that the finality of death lights up and that the superficiality of the commercial age cannot completely obliterate.
Of course, some deaths are tragic and some funerals are painful beyond human comprehension. But the way that death is dealt with in Ireland, the refusal to hide it away and pretend it doesn’t exist, is suggestive of an acknowledgement of something deeper. It seems like an acknowledgement of something more fundamental and basic that a flickering technological age cannot conceal.
I have, over the years, been to some, though to be honest not many, English funerals. I have to say that I have never felt the cold hand of death more starkly than at these affairs. The English appear to deal with death in the same way they deal with many uncomfortable truths, politely and efficiently. Not many people attend, and the deceased shuffles off their mortal coil in a blaze of tea and sandwiches.
Now that may be grossly unfair, as my experience of the intimacies of Irish culture is far greater than my experience of English culture. Still, I found something sterile, something strangely life-denying about the whole English way of responding to death. They were the kind of occasions that I frankly didn’t understand, that whole unemotional structure.
Now, obviously, English people do succumb to terrible grief as much as anyone, and I am only dealing with generalisations, but it is as if the way that English society deals with death means that grief has to break through the whole process rather than be naturally incorporated. Sometimes, as on occasions such as funerals, it is as if the English have hidden themselves away, even from themselves. As my mother has said more than once, the English can be very strange.
I have also, unfortunately, had to attend a number of Irish funerals. The contrast couldn’t be greater. They are long, drawn-out affairs, with huge numbers. I attended one once in Birmingham that concluded with the filling of three pubs and crowds around the doors, and bewildered looks from the passing non-Irish.
I know death is an odd thing to write about. Yet, in a way, I would have felt terribly English avoiding the subject, considering that its visibility is a striking aspect of living in rural Ireland.
I remember once in England waiting at the bus stop to go on a night shift. The bus never came and it was only the next day that I heard that two young people had been killed by a car at the bus stop before mine. I never heard about those two people again. About a week later Princess Diana was killed in a car accident too and a whole nation seemed to go into paroxysms of grief.
A work mate of mine said that he felt he’d lost a close neighbour or something. She wasn’t her neighbour, of course, though those two, forgotten young souls at the bus stop might have been.
People cried for a woman they had never met, and psychologists noted this outpouring of emotion as a seismic shift in the English psyche. If you did not share this grieving you felt almost unable to say so.
I wonder, in terms of death, which society has the healthiest response?
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