Clodagh Finn: Funerals are much more about life than death

Jennifer Sleeman made international headlines when she called for a boycott of Mass to protest the lack of roles for women in the Catholic Church.

It's easy to forget that this is how it ends for all of us when you go to an Irish funeral. It often feels so much more buoyant than that, party-like even, with the buzz of animated chat, the breaking of bread afterwards, and the tears mixed with many outbursts of loud laughter.

But, then, isn’t that the point of it? Because what we are doing is giving the person the very best send-off possible. One they would have thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

I don’t know how often I’ve heard it said that the person who has left us would have loved every minute of their own funeral. It’s our way, perhaps, of facing down the shock of death and turning the ritual around it into the very best sad-happy celebration we can.

Strange as it may sound, there is something very uplifting about coming together to celebrate a life well lived.

The truth of that struck me with particular force last week at the funeral of Jennifer Sleeman — a woman who did so much, and touched so many, in her 95 years on Earth.

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If this were an obituary, we might attempt to sum up her life like this: She was a mother of six, a pre-marriage counsellor, an environmentalist, a Fair Trade pioneer, and a convert to Catholicism who — on the eve of her 81st birthday — famously called for a single-Sunday boycott of Mass to protest about the restricted role of women in the Catholic Church.

Jennifer Sleeman spent part of her childhood on a fruit farm in South Africa.

But that adjective-packed paragraph doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. It does, however, illustrate how we scrabble to capture the essence of a person in words after they are gone.

It’s a way to show our appreciation, but it’s also a vital act of remembrance because, as the saying goes: When somebody dies, a library burns

Jennifer herself used to quote the philosopher Avicenna’s words, “the width of life is much more important than its length” — although she enjoyed both.

You get a sense of just how wide from the series of images being shuffled on the screen at O’Sullivan’s Funeral Home in Clonakilty.

I love those screens, and I love the way that funerals do something similar. The constellation of people gathered to pay their last respects to Sleeman reflect the myriad episodes of her “one wild and precious life”, to borrow a line from Mary Oliver.

In a sense, I shouldn’t have been at her funeral at all. I met her only recently, in May, and as a result of this column. How privileged we are as newspaper chroniclers to have an excuse to elbow our way — some might say barge — into people’s lives to ask outrageously direct questions. But then Sleeman was a woman of remarkable directness, even it was of the gentlest variety.

Jennifer Sleeman has been a dairy farmer, Green Party candidate, and advocate for women.

I went to meet her at Bushmount Nursing Home a few months ago to talk about her exceptional life — her childhood on a fruit farm in South Africa; her experience of the Second World War in Scotland and post-war Berlin; her POW husband Brian Sleeman; her farming days in Killavullen, Co Cork; and the myriad of lives she led after the age of 60.

She was the living embodiment of that jaunty motto: “It’s better to wear out than to rust out.”

In her 60s, she began a new career giving pre-marriage courses. She involved herself in everything: The Green Party, the environmental movement, gardening (she had a blog), tech.

She didn’t have a car or a television, but she was an early adopter of technology with an Amazon account and a busy email address.

Jennifer Sleeman.

Her involvement in the Fair Trade movement alone would guarantee her a place in history.

She ran a campaign from her kitchen table with help from Sinn Féin’s Cionnaith Ó Súilleabháin, Church of Ireland minister Canon Ian Jonas, and Fr Ger Galvin to establish Clonakilty as the first Fair Trade town in Ireland.

There’s a sign at the entrance to the town acknowledging that fact.

But the joy of a funeral is that it can reach beyond the hard facts to cast a light on the true spirit of a person.

If an obituary captures a person in black and white, a funeral illuminates them in full colour

As a child, she wanted to be a cowboy as she rode out with her sister Alix on their parents’ farm in South Africa. Her nephew, James Wolffe, and his wife Sarah recalled that evocative story and added to it: Alix, his mother, wanted to be a lion tamer. (She did go on to train domestic cats, no mean achievement.)

Jennifer Sleeman ran a campaign from her kitchen table with help from Sinn Féin’s Cionnaith Ó Súilleabháin, Church of Ireland minister Canon Ian Jonas, and Fr Ger Galvin to establish Clonakilty as the first Fair Trade town in Ireland.

Jennifer had two other sisters, the late Joyce and Astri LeRoy whose, heart-rending adieu was read from the altar at her funeral service at St Michael’s Church in Rathbarry.

It’s an unusual funeral, not least because the woman at the centre of it had planned every part of it right down to asking a carpenter to make a coffin for her decades before she died.

Just weeks before she needed it, she spoke about death with remarkable calm.

“I’m not afraid to die, but I am curious,” she said.

One of her last campaigns was to get people talking about death.

“We all die, and I think it’s sad that we don’t talk about it,” she said.

Her attitude gave a joyful cast to the service, helped in no small measure by the fact that her friend of 30 years, Fr Pat Fogarty, was saying Mass

 Another friend, the interfaith minister Dr Rev Nóirín Ní Riain, led the singing from the altar.

Jennifer also left an instruction to sing. She knew only too well that the usually song-shy Catholic congregation would need coaxing.

The church was packed. The President’s aide-de-camp, Col Tom McGrath, had made it to this far-flung pocket of West Cork along with so many more. The Irish gathered at speed to pay their last respects.

It’s because we understand the universality of grief, I think.

Jennifer's wedding to Brian Sleeman in 1949.

Perhaps that is why it was intensely moving to see Jennifer’s children — Andrew, Paddy, Duncan, Mary, Katey, Patricia (Bushy) — carry her coffin as it made its way into the church while Amazing Grace is bagpiped into the early autumn air.

For the last four years, they were the six sides of a hexagon who kept their mother company on daily visits to her nursing home.

It is impossible to express all they felt and will feel in the days to come, as anybody who has suffered loss knows only too well.

That is why it was a blessed relief to retreat to O’Donovan’s Hotel in the centre of Clonakilty after the burial. Jennifer left an instruction to serve soup and sandwiches at her after-funeral do, because she wanted people to circulate.

And they did, along with the many stories about her life. Like the time she went to buy broccoli plants from the station master in Killavullen, Co Cork, and he said: “They are not very broccoli-minded around here.”

She went away with cabbage plants instead. Or the time she took a fig from her fig tree, gave it to her children, and said: “Taste heaven.”

The wonderful thing about Irish funerals is that you don’t have to believe in heaven to join in a celebration that turns a sad occasion into something uplifting and affirming.

Let us give the last word to Jennifer.

She didn’t want people to say she died at such and such an age, rather that she lived until then.

We can complete that sentence now. Jennifer Sleeman lived wholly, joyously, purposefully, and importantly until she was 95 years old.