Sarah Harte: Why are Irish people not culturally daunted by death?

Death is the one transition, apart from birth, that we all go through, writes Sarah Harte. Picture: iStock

Why, as Irish people, are we not culturally daunted by death? One hypothesis I read was that we are accustomed to loss due to our long history of migration, which is an interesting observation.

As a character in Kiran Desai’s much-praised novel  The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, currently shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, says: “An immigrant story is also a ghost story and a murder story."

"You become a ghost, the people left behind become ghostly, sometimes you kill them by the heartlessness of leaving, sometimes you psychically kill yourself.”

I only wonder because death felt everywhere this week. 

Deirdre O’Shaughnessy, of The Deirdre O'Shaughnessy Podcast and the opinion editor of the Irish Examiner, did a moving interview on Tuesday on Moncrieff with Sean Moncrieff about coping with the death of both her parents, who died in the past three years. 

There was an interesting aside about anticipatory grief, which is when you grieve for a person while they are still alive, worrying about a future that won’t include them. It's a common phenomenon, I suspect, among many of us. The tone was both raw and supremely hopeful. It’s well worth a listen.

Then on Wednesday morning came the sad news that an old family friend had died. At her funeral in Baltimore on Saturday, we buried her. A relative of mine sent a WhatsApp message to another relative who wasn’t there: “Really lovely. Sun shining. A life well lived and someone who was loved dearly.” It was a good summation.

Top-drawer prayers

Standing by the sparkling sea, we intoned the rosary around the grave. The prayers took the strain. In that moment, there are few lines as powerful as “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us now, and at the hour of our death.” It’s top-drawer stuff in terms of its narrative power.

Irish funerals are somehow special. Weddings are fine but as you get older, you think: "Dear God, how am I going to make it through the eternal day?"

A part of you watches the couple and thinks what a leap of optimism it is to get married. A wedding is about hope, yes, but it is also about putting on a show. 

People are not necessarily bound together when you have two families conjoining, often two tribes with little in common.

Death is when the bereaved, the living, and the departed are connected in a celebration and honouring of the deceased’s life. There is also an existential reckoning of what life is about for older people.

It might be an obvious thing to say, but we do death well. Several years ago, I went to a brutal English funeral. It was short and sharp. The mass booklets were left lying on the church benches. The relative I was accompanying, distressed by this, asked me to help her collect all the booklets. We brought them back to Ireland on the plane that night.

We had a fleeting lunch at a Travelodge, then everyone dispersed. When I say everyone, I mean a miserly crowd. 

I can’t comment on Anglo-Saxon burial rituals; it was just one funeral, but I recall sensing a certain embarrassment or unease surrounding mortality and death

Irish funerals are the best of us. In rural Ireland, many traditional customs surrounding death remain, where locally many people are likely to have known the deceased. The wake, the open coffin at home, keeping the dead company all night. Women (it’s always women) making sandwiches and cakes, and tea, and washing up as neighbours and friends fill the house. The removal, followed by the funeral, and then the journey to the graveyard, often walking behind the hearse. Local people in high viz directing traffic.

I know one woman, a publican in Miltown Malbay who was waked in her own pub. Incidentally, that same woman — known for her nostrums and ability as a petite woman to keep order and quell large beer-filled men with a look — used to say: “I’d rather have a rat come into the house than a wedding invitation.” 

Many men of my generation and older have been taught all of their lives to hold their emotions in, and a funeral is the one place where they can show emotion and cry.

Embracing shared mortality

In his Ted talk, journalist Kevin Toolis connects the Iliad —which he describes as a bardic poem and a foundation of Western civilisation, older than the Bible, written by Homer around 700BC — to the Irish wake. 

He contends that living life fully means embracing our shared mortality. The Irish wake, he thinks, teaches us not only about death but also about living and how to be brave in the face of sorrow.

Death, he says, offers a way to reconnect with not only the people you love, but also with yourself and your community. Irish wakes, he says, are not just another Irish piss-up as is often depicted in movies; they normalise death. This is particularly the case for children who come to understand that death is an integral part of life.

In reality, how often do we come together and sit with important, if difficult, feelings? 

A new book, Finding Focus, by behavioural scientist Zelana Montminy asserts that “our most valuable resource isn’t time. It’s attention”. 

She believes we have lost the ability to control what we give time to. Blame it on our ceaseless connectivity. She writes that “every ping, every scroll, every ‘just one more button’ is designed to hijack” our nervous systems.

A funeral is a bittersweet pleasure, a reaffirmation of our most human, pre-smartphone selves

In the hotel in Baltimore, I watched people move around the room, chatting to one another, taking each other's hands, and looking into each other's faces. Not once did I see anyone on a phone, talking on a call, or being distracted. We were there with the family, fully present, trying to help them carry their burden.

After the hotel, we went home, and I sat with my own family in the kitchen, reminiscing, talking about the deceased, sharing old stories and memories with a dollop of dark humour (one story involved an over-zealous mourner falling into a grave and breaking a limb), and endless pots of tea. 

Another hot drop? Somehow, nobody hurried; we just sat there conversing. In an age of distraction, living in different places with different schedules, that is something.

So, we wear different clothes than a hundred years ago. We live in cosy, well-insulated homes. We drive cars rather than carts and horses, but we still keen, and feast and gather around the dead. There is something deeply civilised about that, and we shouldn’t lose those strong cultural traditions.

Death is the one transition, apart from birth, that we all go through. I’ll leave the last line to Homer.

“No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny. No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man's hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born.”