Searching for heroes among the dead

Who owns the dead? Who can claim that a deceased person’s spirit lives on in pursuit of changed circumstances?

The questions arose in the course of a walk through St Finbarr’s cemetery in Cork last week. I’m not a regular visitor, but circumstances dictated that a dog required a walk, and somebody had to be pressganged into providing his constitutional.

On a hazy day, with currents of cut grass perfuming the air, me and the mutt walked among the dead. Therein, corralled in the Republican plot, the question hung among the mute crosses. Who owns the dead?

But before delving into the political, a graveyard is primarily about the personal.

The word oasis certainly does justice to St Finbarr’s. Beyond its ancient stoned perimeter, commercial, domestic, and city life unfolds in the suburb of Glasheen. Inside, among the rows of marble and stone memorials, the only sound is the wind in the trees, and traffic from beyond, sounding like the sea.

Hints of a city’s life, of its people down through the ages, push up from the graves. Many who found fame in life — none more so than Jack Lynch — rest here, but in some ways it is those who travelled in relative anonymity between the mysteries of birth and death that excite greater interest.

What details of a life can be gleaned for a headstone? In more than a few graves, there are dates that reveal a life in which a child died decades before his or her parents.

The unnatural progression of those parents, from burying their young through the rest of life, can only be guessed at. How heavy did the pain weigh through their remaining chain of years? Did they find solace in

religion, or other children?

There were also a few in which a child is buried with his or her grandparents. What became of the missing generation?

The members of a number of religious orders lay across the plains of St Finbarr’s. Their names are recorded in columns next to the dates on which they faithfully departed.

Unlike most others, they are not buried with families. There is no detail of where they came from, how long they lived, whether they had predeceased or surviving siblings.

Only a date. Fidelity to their order demanded that on signing up, this would be their family. And the date, well, perhaps its symbolic significance is not as an ending, but the beginning of an afterlife, to which time on this mortal coil was but a prelude before the real deal kicked in?

Elsewhere, memorials refer to the departed’s achievements while alive. More than one has the dual NT TD after their names, presenting images of the dead man at different times of life giving the benefit of his wisdom to children, or perhaps boring the pants off the Dáil on a slow Tuesday.

One memorial has the guts of an alphabet compiled after the names of father, mother, and daughter, all of whom went to their grave as highly qualified individuals.

There is a stone slab commemorating a man who died in 1930. It reveals that he was the “chief inspector of the Munster and Leinster bank”. Would any banker want that on a grave in these turbulent times? And what of the man himself? If he were alive today, how would he regard his fellows who blindly followed the Pied Piper Sean Fitzpatrick?

More likely, that banker was probably a man of extreme caution, but he must have had a great sense of self that he wanted to tell all who passed by his grave that he made it all the way to chief inspector.

Not too far away lies a family lie including one of their number whose separate stone declares that he served in the “US Navy”. Another word is carved just below that detail. “Vietnam.”

The man was born in 1930 and died in 1988, which would have put him in his mid- to late-thirties when he most likely saw action in the South East Asia conflict. It’s safe to assume he wasn’t among the legions of American youth conscripted to serve.

Did he do it for the Green card? Or was he a career soldier, serving the last century’s superpower across the globe? Why mention a discredited war like Vietnam at all, unless to commemorate the kinship felt by those who served?

That grave, as with many others, depicts the blighted narrative of emigration. A plot which hugs the eastern wall of the graveyard remembers a local couple and their children, including an infant.

The rest of the brood ended life respectively in Singapore, New Mexico, and Lancashire. In life, the family, like so many others, was scattered across the globe, but in death, the memorial draws them all back to the Cork of their formative youth, when the world beyond the city’s streets and lanes didn’t exist at all.

The first feature that any visitor to St Finbarr’s encounters is the Republican plot. Therein lies a succession of figures who died in the Republican cause. Two of the most prominent stones remember Thomas McCurtain and Terence MacSwiney, lords mayor of the city who, respectively, murdered by British forces and died on hunger strike during the War of Independence.

Also among the stones are the names of those who died fighting for the IRA in the decades after the British left, and more recently, in the years of strife that exploded in the North more than 40 years ago.

A number of political parties make pilgrimages to St Finbarr’s annually to remember those whom they regard as their forebears. But who can seriously lay claim to people such as McCurtain and MacSwiney? For most people on this island, the war that those men fought was on a different moral plane from the conflicts that followed through most of the rest of the century.

Can Sinn Féin claim them, or Republican Sinn Féin, or even Fianna Fáil? Who’s to say that either man wouldn’t have ended up in Fine Gael? Who’s to say they wouldn’t have acquiesced to a treaty signed by a figure such as Michael Collins? Incidentally, Fine Gael is one of the few parties which doesn’t come annually to the plot. Why not?

Family members will often emerge to suggest that a departed individual wouldnever have agreed to a particular course which was ultimately taken after his death. But very often, this has as much to do with the politics of the living rather than the dead.

This was evident in recent years with the involvement of Bernadette Sands in the political entity which refused to accept the Good Friday Agreement. She always claimed her brother Bobby would never have gone along with it.

That’s the thing about the dead: They can’t speak for themselves, and in such a vacuum it is open to others to claim purchase on their beliefs.

By the end of it all, me and the mutt were up to our ears in graves. I looked at him, and he looked and me, and we headed for the gate out onto Glasheen Road.

It was time to get back among the living and get busy being alive.