GOODBYES
By Cláir Ní Aonghusa
In Ireland, we pride ourselves on doing funerals well. They are public occasions. Friends attend the funerals of their friends’ parents without knowing the parents, work colleagues turn up as a mark of respect, and long forgotten acquaintances can appear unexpectedly.
Until fairly recently, funerals were always preceded by what’s known as a ‘wake’, A wake was a mixture of celebrating the person’s life—giving them a ‘good send-off’—and keeping vigil with the bereaved, generally in the home of the deceased, the deceased’s body present throughout, usually in a coffin. This practice is still common in rural Ireland
The viewing of remains, as they’re called, even if it takes place in a funeral parlour, is as important as ever. And the custom whereby neighbours and friends deliver food supplies to the family—cooked meals, snacks, sandwiches, cakes, tarts etc—still endures, especially in rural areas.
Covid 19 restrictions limit attendance at funerals to immediate family members. The hotels and pubs where people habitually gather for the traditional food and refreshments after the burial are shut, and the supports the bereaved rely on to sustain them in the immediacy of their loss are denied them.
Happily, communities are discovering ways around such strictures. Funerals are being live-streamed for those unable to attend. A new custom of people standing to attention in the street, or at their front doors, or in their gardens, as a hearse passes has sprung up. Masses or services are broadcast on screen or loudspeaker to friends and neighbours sitting in cars parked in church grounds. Resourceful mourners have adapted online ordering and payment systems to co-ordinate the delivery of take-outs. Food arrives at various locations at approximately the same time, and Zoom or Messenger or WhatsApp enables families, neighbours and friends to see and talk to each other.
Just the other day, my friend Adam told me how, in May, his husband and he dressed up formally in suit and tie to sit at their kitchen table and watch the streamed funeral of a boating friend, an old man his husband had stayed with on numerous occasions. Adam hadn’t ever met this person, but he said that lovely readings and a family eulogy brought him to life by recreating what was special about him.
Lockdown regulations prevented me from being at two funerals that, in a pre-Covid world, I’d have attended. I wasn’t close to either person, but the two who died were hugely important to people who matter to me. In April, my UK based cousin Nora lost her aunt. As a child, I’d been in this woman’s house in North Cork a number of times, and I’d often played with two of her daughters during summer holidays. Nora lamented not being able to be with her cousins while their mother was dying. However, when their mother’s remains came home from hospital, they connected with Nora on Messenger, and she was able to talk to everyone and say prayers with them. On the day of the funeral neighbours gathered outside the house to say farewell. In the church grounds, the mass was relayed to another group of neighbours via loudspeaker, and more people came out to wave at them on the way to the cemetery. All of this greatly consoled the family. To finish, they had dinners delivered to the various houses and used WhatsApp video calls and Skype to talk to far flung relatives.
When, in May, the mother of my friend Sheila unexpectedly died after a brief, again non-Covid related, illness, I was shaken by the speed with which everything happened. Within a week of being taken ill, the woman had passed away. Although I’d never actually met her, I knew that she had been a feisty, independent soul. Sheila, an only child, was left to manage everything on her own. David and I, and many of her friends, were obliged to stay in Dublin as she’d been very firm that she didn’t want any of us to breach travel restrictions in order to attend. We worried that the funeral would be an ordeal for her. The hearse departed Dublin in the early afternoon on its lonely 130km journey, followed only by Sheila’s car. To her great surprise, when the hearse reached the town’s funeral parlour, instead of the handful of mourners anticipated, an array of relatives and people who knew her mother turned out to greet it. There, and at the graveyard the following day, a good-sized gathering observed the physical distancing rules while, at the same time, honouring her mother and Sheila.
Some scorn the use of technology at funerals, wanting everything to be as it has been for generations, while others happily embrace the opportunities it offers. Had Covid 19 not disrupted life so effectively, behaviours and customs wouldn’t have evolved. The technology whereby someone who can’t be physically present at an event can be included has existed for quite some time, but it has taken a major crisis to provoke people into being inventive with it. Intimacy and connection don’t have to be sacrificed when talking to others on screen. A moving eulogy will affect whoever hears it, no matter what the medium.
If, at some stage, life again conforms to what we, until recently, thought of as ‘normal’, I can’t help wondering if we’ll revert to previous habits, or if some of these innovations will endure? For example, might some funerals now be streamed or recorded as a matter of course for those who, for reasons of age or disability or distance, cannot attend?
https://www.rte.ie/news/corona
Video from RTÉ News March 2020: Kerry Community* pays respects to parishioner amid restrictions. (*Baile an Fheirtéaraigh parish)
The written blog content is copyrighted by Cláir Ní Aonghusa (C) 2020.
Cláir Ní Aonghusa is a writer, teacher and lecturer. Her short stories have been published widely. Her published novels are 'Four Houses & A Funeral' (Poolbeg 1997) and 'Civil & Strange' (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2008, and Penguin Ireland 2009). She is currently completing a memoir about what she learned when she took the difficult decision to sell her father's family home, twenty-three years after inheriting it, and how she feels now that it's gone. Cláir may be reached at clairniaonghusa@gmail.com
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