Waking the dead

Born within the slipstream of our father’s and
mother’s lives, we follow involuntarily in their wake.

True dat!  It's a sentence from early in My Father's Wake, how the Irish teach us to live, love and die (2017) by Kevin Toolis. Toolis was born and grew up in Edinburgh but Home was a modest storm-drubbed 3 room cottage on Achill Island, Co Mayo. He thus has cultural feet one planted on each side of the Irish Sea. Me, too.

Whatever about The Past, End-of-Life issues are a foreign country: they do things differently (t)here.

• When we came back to Ireland in 1990, my boss was British but had been living and working in Dublin for 8 years. One  afternoon the department had emptied for the funeral of a colleague's mother. Two pints down in the pub that night, the gaffer had admitted he would be appalled if I or anyone else gate-crashed the funeral of his father. 
• otoh I have an old friend who was working in one of the Dublin Art Colleges. A colleague's mother died back home in London. My friend did her normal, booked a return flight to LHR to show face at the funeral. Consternation among the tiny gathering of neighbours and immediate family.  
• In 2001, after my father died in England, we had a nuclear-family conference round the dining room table with the undertaker. You could see the colour drain from his face when I suggested it would be nice to carry the Old Man into the church.

Toolis had a couple of medical NDEs as a child and had sojourned in Male Medical wards in the local hospital for several weeks. He witnessed more death in that time than his school-mates would come up against in their entire lives. When he grew up, he became a free-lance journalist covering The Troubles. He seemed to have a talent for blagging his way into people's homes and asking intrusive questions; which the bereaved or traumatized were too avoid answering. From there he became a war correspondent wherever hell was going down and he witnessed grief, loss and coping in each different place & culture. Because [troubles, Palestine, Bosnia, Sunni, Shia] alien cultures can be your next-door neighbours. But East West - Home is Best. IF Home is Achill rather than London.

Toolis is firm in his belief that the Irish system is the Norm even a Universal manifestation of the human condition and has been since Homer wrote the Iliad. Or even since Cro-magnons were banging two rocks together picking flowers for their beloved dead. In La Douleur et les Regrets d'Andromaque sur le corps d'Hector son mari [R 1793 Jacques-Louis David via wikicommons] Hector is clearly 'open coffin' in the Irish way. But he has a book to sell, and the Irish market for end-of-life issues is microscopic (folk would rather read death-at-a-distance through Donna Leon, Patricia Cornwell, PD James). The hook is to demonstrate that the Western way of death is sanitized, medicalized, disempowering and Closure-avoidant. Readers in USA, Canada, UK etc. are doing it all wrong. Indeed Merriam-Webster tags wake "to remain awake on watch especially over a corpse" as archaic because Americans don't do that anymore.

His lifetime accumulation of experience as a death-witness for strangers qualifies him to critically evaluate his own father's short, messy, painful end from pancreatic cancer. Sonny was not lucky, I regret his early loss. Sonny would have dismissed the thought. Under the sun, death comes when it comes. In Ireland because death is integrated in community life it becomes normal - as well as inevitable. In England it is invisible. One of the great aspects of Sonny's death is that the community knows what to do without having to involve The Man at all. And yes it is, since Homer's day, women's work. The body is washed and dressed [A Lot of cotton-wool will be required]; a coffin and hearse is booked; hang-sangwiches for 5,000 miraculously appear; along with a monster tea-pot or two; extra chairs and delph are borrowed; hugs and handshakes; sorry for your troubles on repeat.

It's nice that "wake" is used in it's other meaning in the opening quote; because Sonny went shoring [beachcombing] every day he lived on Achill. It me! It Grace! Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar. Traveller, there is no path only your wake on the sea.