An Irish Wake

You learn a lot about life, in death. It has been 23 years since my father’s, and it continues to educate me.

Excerpt from a Facebook post by a football club in rural Northern Ireland a few years ago.

A number of things are certainties at an Irish wake. There will be an assortment of women in competition to become the alpha female in the kitchen. They will roll their eyes behind each others’ backs about how undomesticated one or another of them is, and mouth thing things like “hasn’t a clue, has she?” when one picks up the tea towel that is being used as oven glove, rather the tea towel to dry dishes. They will seize side plates from mourners hands the moment the last bite departs said plate and brandish it like a trophy, proving their efficiency, in this game of oneupwomanship. The amateurs at this sport will try and drape a cloth over their shoulder, hoping they look like they know what they are doing and not finish last in the “useless in the kitchen” game, as there is no greater humiliation. Outside, there will be several officious men pacing with restless energy. Those who aren’t will be smoking. One will seize the role of director of traffic operations. Walkie talkies and high-vis jackets will materialise from nowhere. There will be a parking system. There will be a prolific wake and funeral attender, from outside the locality, and everyone will ponder their tenuous link to deceased or to the bereaved family that warrants their presence. The tea and sandwiches on offer will be the subject of local gossip, maybe achieve legendary status and be talked about for years to come if particularly good. Grape and chicken go will down well, but simultaneously be acknowledged as highfalutin. Anyone with special dietary requirements will forever be considered as having notions. These are my observations accumulated from many wakes I have attended in adulthood. It is quite the phenomenon. But oddly, I recall only some of these details from my own home, twenty three years ago. My memories are of something else.

My father died on Sept 9th 2001 - two days before 9/11. I was 17, he was 51. As he lay cold in the casket, surrounded by mourners paying their last respects, the news from America swept through the wake house and - unusually at Irish wake - the TV was turned on to see the coverage. The tragedy in New York unfolded in the midst of my own.

He was, in the family, the man with a plan, the sports fanatic, the one with terrible puns though never deterred from deploying one, and was above all utterly adept at building a happy life. The priest at the homily said that “he wore his christianity on his sleeve”, which I always thought was a clever way of acknowledging that he wasn’t a religious man but that he was a damned good person. After his death my family unexpectedly received a letter of thanks and some photos in the post from hitchhikers he had picked up in the neighbouring town, took home, made sandwiches for and let sample his whiskey before driving them on to their next spot. That typifies him, really - up for the craic, and no need to tell anyone about how good a person he was. I’m certain the hitchhikers wouldn’t have felt his actions charitable or patronising, but born out of genuine interest in them, and, having hitchhiked himself in his heyday, being keen to pay goodwill forward.

More words about my father -Martin -from the priest’s homily at his funeral. I like them.

It was his lungs, in case you’re wondering. He didn’t smoke, but he had crappy lungs. He went to be assessed for suitability for a transplsant in Newcastle, England, caught an infection while there and was met on the airport runway by an ambulance from the return flight. He never came home. Happily teaching at the start of the year, and dead by September.

The Sunday he died I remember the male doctor calling my family into a room around lunchtime. He said that my fathers’ organs were shutting down. I wondered oh, ok, so what do you do now to start them up again? He said the next 24 hours would be crucial. I thought, you’ve got work to do, boyo, don’t be letting us busy you here! I had no idea of the significance of his words. It never dawned on me he would die soon. I still don’t know if the rest of my family knew it. My two brothers and I went home while my mother stayed at the hospital. It was tense - amplified heavy silence broken only by the dull buzz of the fridge and the dripping of a distant tap. At around 10pm someone called the house, telling us to come back to the hospital. A family friend drove us there. The radio filled the silent void where our easy familial chat would usually be, with motorway lights rhythmically illuminating our faces in the car, alternating with darkness. When we arrived at the hospital we moved at increasing pace to the ward. It was without thought or dialogue, but by the time we arrived at the ward we were all running. The tension was replaced with unspoken urgency, but still the silence remained. I was met by my only paternal uncle, a recovering alcoholic who had buried a son in the troubles, and so no stranger to pain. He clasped both my hands. His eyes said all that his mouth couldn’t. He eventually got the words out: I’m sorry. I knew what he was trying to say, and I knew exactly what he meant. For all that was unsaid, I knew. I wanted to tell him it was ok, he didn’t have to be sorry, it wasn’t his fault, and I knew that it wasn’t his fault, but it was my turn for the words not to come. I clasped his hands back, shivering or shaking, I don’t know.

By the time we arrived home it was 3am. I knew nothing of wake culture, and how or if people would know, so I called my friend (on my trusty Nokia 8210) and told her he was gone. She said she was sorry too.

But I needn’t have worried. In Ireland, word spreads like wildfire, and his death although late at night was in time to be announced at school assembly the following morning. Wake culture is huge. I’ve said to many grieving families in the intervening years that it’s where Irish culture really comes into its own, that the wake offers a raft to carry them through those initial few days after a bereavement, to the next stage, and buoys them from entering a black hole of despair. Yet I’m not certain I fully believe it to be true. At that time I craved solitude and peace, but the next few days were a blur of people coming and going. At one point the school principal, who I’d only ever seen on stage from a distance, was in my family kitchen, drinking tea. It was as incongruent a scene as I could ever have imagined.

What’s more, I knew that all the people who visited the wake house were well meaning. They were kind, offering their condolences, sympathies, and cards. But try as I did, I could not feel their warmth, or take comfort. It felt like a standard issue, cookie cutter response, read from a script: “sorry for your troubles”. I had not acquired the necessary social skills with which to respond to this, aged 17. I realise now that the equally standard issue response is a simple “thank you” and /or “thanks for coming” but I didn’t know that then. Nor did I know how to graciously accept compliments on our family home size or decor. I just felt embarrassed. I resented the presence of the people in my home and I felt ashamed that I wasn’t more appreciative and welcoming.

Nobility was poured on me. “You’re so strong” they said, commending me. I didn’t feel strong. I felt like I was enduring waking hours, going through the motions in body only. I couldn’t stand this praise, it made me wince inwardly to receive it, as I felt undeserving that it was being awarded to me in my passivity. I always felt that this image of me as the strong one brought more comfort to those choosing to see me as that, than to me.

Within hours I had worked out that faux joviality seemed to make it easier for everyone, but it was exhausting. Even so, I felt responsible for setting the tone of conversations so that people felt comfortable, and putting them at ease seemed to be in my gift this way. Once, I excused myself to the downstairs loo, locked the door and mouthed silent screams to the tiled walls, before going out and shaking hands, meeting and greeting once again.

Two days later and the funeral came and went. There was no sense of celebration of life, as the death was too unexpected and quick in the end for that. There was only desolation. It was, by the town standard, “a big funeral” with hundreds of people. I’ve often thought of the cruel irony that the one person who would have known how to help us navigate that difficult day, was the man we put in the ground.

I went back to school the week after, and life went on. It was my A-Level year. Although I’ve had many since, it was the first time I became aware of an identity shift. I was no longer whoever I was before; I was now that poor girl with the dead father. Adolescents, then, were cut out for many things, like perfecting eyeliner application and learning how to drink vodka inexpensively. They were less cut out for dealing with death, and I learned that making any reference to my late father was a real conversation stifler, so I didn’t.

Pity and even heartfelt sympathy come easy to most decent people. It is comforting to experience them - perhaps a reassurance that we are good. I felt then, and still do now, both sentiments disempowering to receive, and hard to break free from. Compassion is different and is less often encountered. Compassion is more about meeting the pity subject where they are and letting them be. I don’t think I was easy to be around in the days, weeks, or months after, as I continued to grow up and grapple my inner turmoil, but I only very occasionally found others who were curious and brave, or maybe skilled, enough to meet me with it.

Today, I’m still struck by how often we romanticise misery, and the ease with which the mind understands and admires a stoic, gentle kind of grief. But there is a kind of grief that manifests as more jagged and inconvenient. Like crying on a night out and wanting to go home. Like protesting you are FINE, just really really upset that, say, the grocery bag burst. My father’s wake house taught me to believe that you gain peoples respect by masking all those complicated feelings and never appearing to struggle. It seemed to me that people liked you better that way. I know now that some did, but the right people don’t - they take you as you messily are.

My mother tending to the grave in 2019.

An Irish wake probably brings comfort to a great deal many people. I’ll never know what my most wrenching loss would have felt like without it - a controlled comparison doesn’t exist. But the initial shock and loss isn’t the hardest part. The hardest part is the time after, the years spent shaping a life without the loved one, knowing how different life would be if they were present, long after the condolences and tea and sandwiches have passed. I learned a long time ago that mastery of grief is a myth. Even when all the milestone moments pass, and the next generations come along, when you think there can be no more moments of sharpened pain, it surprises you. It becomes less arresting, in time, but it is still there.

So on the eve of his 23rd anniversary, to my father - you are missed. Your puns were shit, but you are so sorely missed. Oh and do send me a sign, if you can, about where I should move to? Knowing what to do is your field. Keeping in zones 1-2, of course. Good man.

Until next time…

Big love

Una

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