We Irish love death. This fixation on death has given rise to the quip that obituaries are “the Irish sports pages.” My mother, Josephine Gallagher (née Farrell), in her 87th year, cuts obituaries out of the newspaper and keeps them as joyful remembrances of family and friends who have moved on, mostly from her parish, but not exclusively. Some even get posted to her refrigerator.
Irish (and English) poets have written moving laments about death, such as these:
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love...
-William Butler Yeats
Mid-Term Break
…Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
-Seamus Heaney on coming home from school because his younger brother died.
Death is Nothing at All
Death is nothing at all
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.
…I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very near.
Just around the corner.
All is well.
Nothing is past; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before
only better, infinitely happier and forever we will all be one together with Christ.
-Henry Scott Holland, an English clergyman, wrote this poem in 1910.
The poem was popularized by the Carmelite monks in Tallow, County Waterford.
Irish (and English) musicians have created stirring lyrics and sounds capturing death, such as “The Soft Goodbye” (Celtic Women), “She Moved Through the Fair” (ancient verses reworked by Pádraic Colum) and “Carrickfergus” (a traditional Irish folk song). Of course, there is the iconic ballad, “Danny Boy” (by English songwriter Frederic Weatherly and set to the Irish Londonderry Air).
One of my favorite novels published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2002 is titled, “By the Lake,” by John McGahern (1934-2006), who is sometimes called the “Irish Chekov” (referencing Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the Russian playwright and short-story writer who is one of the greatest writers of short fiction in history). McGahern is one of the most important writers in the second half of the twentieth century.
McGahern takes the reader into a rural village in Ireland by a lake and painstakingly tells the story of its ordinary people through the course of one year, including their intimate connection to death.
In the last twenty-some pages of the 335-page book, Johnny, the adult son of a local couple, Jamesie and Mary, suffers a heart attack while visiting his parents and dies. McGahern goes into detail about the immediate preparation the body inside the home for visitation while the house filled up with mourners. Ruttledge, who has volunteered to prepare the body with his helpmate, Tom Kelly, stopped for a moment and gazing at the lifeless body, said, “The innate sacredness of each single life stood out more starkly in death than in the whole of its natural life.” Later as the Irish wake was in full swing, one mourner remarked, “If we couldn’t have a laugh or two we might as well go and lie down ourselves.”
In the Catholic church’s funeral Mass, after sprinkling holy water that recalls our Baptism and incensing the coffin after Communion, the priest-celebrant offers the final prayer of commendation with these comforting words:
Into your hands, Father of mercies,
we commend our brother/sister,
in the sure and certain hope
that together with all who have died in Christ,
he/she will rise with him on the last day.
We give you thanks for the blessings
which you have bestowed upon our brother/sister in this life:
they are signs to us of your goodness
and of our fellowship with the saints in Christ.
Merciful Lord,
turn toward us and listen to our prayers:
open the gates of paradise to your servant
and help us who remain
to comfort one another with assurances of faith,
until we all meet in Christ
and are with you and with our brother/sister forever.
It may well be that we Irish embrace death, since we trust deeply in faith – in the sure and certain hope – that death is indeed a gateway into eternal life where we will live in God’s life and in God’s love for all eternity. In the meantime, there is remembered joy of those who have gone before us and whom we miss dearly.
Remembered Joy
Don’t grieve for me, for now I’m free!
I follow the plan God laid for me.
I saw His face, I heard His call,
I took His hand and left it all…
I could not stay another day,
To love, to laugh, to work or play;
Tasks left undone must stay that way.
And if my parting has left a void,
Then fill it with remembered joy.
-An Irish funeral poem by an unknown author, urges mourners not to
grieve for the deceased, explaining he or she is following God's plan.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.
