“In our secular world we labour to hide death. We send our people to die by themselves in old folk’s homes; no longer in our homes; no longer with us. We cremate them. We have funerals without bodies. We don’t touch dead people. We don’t pray over them any more like Christians always have. Michael Angelo’s Pieta; with the Mother of God holding the dead body of her son; that could never be made today, because who holds anybody’s dead body.”
Father Josiah Trenham.
“go bhfuaras romham tú marbh
cois toirín ísil aitinn,
gan Pápa gan easpag,
gan cléireach gan sagart
do léifeadh ort an tsailm,
ach seanbhean chríonna chaite
do leath ort binn dá fallaing—
do chuid fola leat ’na sraithibh;
is níor fhanas le hí ghlanadh
ach í ól suas lem basaibh.” –extract: Caoineadh Art Uí Laoighre, by Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill
“Till I found you dead before me
beside a little furze bush
without Pope or bishop
without priest or cleric
to read the death-psalms for you.
But a spent old woman only
who spread her cloak to shroud you-
your heart’s blood was still flowing
I did not stay to wipe it
But filled my hands and drank it” –translation by Seán Ó Tuama
The contrast between these two speeches on death could not be more stark. Fr. Josiah Trenham laments a secular fear of death which attempts to sanitize the confrontation with mortality by hiding the moment of frailty when death touches us; though that means abandoning the dying. This sanitized picture presents a stripping of the humane from this moment of final concilliation –a confrontation with vulnerability embedded in the material reality of existence. He called this a “hope destroying, joy dissolving, love abandoning” fruit of a despiritualised existence.
Eibhlín Dubh’s emotional and spiritual upheaval (written in 1773 on the murder of her husband Art) described in her epic poem, is gut wrenching and soul searing. As she comes on her dead husband, the violent upheaval within her is as if his life is being torn out through her body.
She is violently sundered, and the part of her soul she entwined with Art is being physically wrenched from her. That entwined knot wrenching free, leaves a felt void, and she tries to grasp hold of some part of it. The closeness of death and life make them indistinguishable and she grasps and consumes what life is physically flowing from Art’s body. “The earth is not worthy to drink his blood” was how one scholar described this striking scene containing the powerful visual contrast of Eibhlín grasping in the dirt at Arts lifeblood and the biblical metaphor of the body returning to dirt
The physicality of this description; graphic, harrowing, and emotionally compelling; implies that life and death are experiential, and to be fully human is to experience all the torment and terror and joy of existence, and that includes living and dying.
Sometime around 1900, J.M Synge describes a moment on Inis Meáin where a team of men unearthed an old coffin while digging the grave of a recently deceased. He wrote:
“Then the men began their work, clearing off stones and thin layers of earth, and breaking up an old coffin that was in the place into which the new one had to be lowered. When a number of blackened boards and pieces of bone had been thrown up with the clay, a skull was lifted out, and placed upon a gravestone. Immediately the old woman, the mother of the dead man, took it up in her hands, and carried it away by herself. Then she sat down and put it in her lap—it was the skull of her own mother—and began keening and shrieking over it with the wildest lamentation.”
The death of a member of the community in these accounts is experienced on deep personal levels, and as a communal ritual.
The rituals of death join a community in a traumatic experience. That occasion of death, which shakes each soul but is expressed uniquely in each, manifested in the wake, is not only the acknowledgment of the reposed; it is the recognition of the ties that have been severed by death between the deceased and all the people who went before him or her; and those left behind. The Bean Caointe (Keening Women) laments the attributes of the deceased and the many ways they were part of a community; and laments the personal ties that family and community had with them. In the caoineadh, the private grief becomes public, and the great burden of personal grief privately held is shared and carried amongst the community.
Synge, in his account of life on the Aran Islands, described this: “While the grave was being opened the women sat down among the flat tombstones, bordered with a pale fringe of early bracken, and began the wild keen, or crying for the dead. Each old woman, as she took her turn in the leading recitative, seemed possessed for the moment with a profound ecstasy of grief, swaying to and fro, and bending her forehead to the stone before her, while she called out to the dead with a perpetually recurring chant of sobs.”
“All round the graveyard other wrinkled women, looking out from under the deep red petticoats that cloaked them, rocked themselves with the same rhythm, and intoned the inarticulate chant that is sustained by all as an accompaniment.”
At another wake; a wake of one taken by the sea, he described how “This grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas. They are usually silent, but in the presence of death all outward show of indifference or patience is forgotten”
The Wake is that time of separation. The refusal to let go, the slow release – let the dead bury the dead- the mingling of living and dead, as if there is a coexistence of spirit in this liminal space. The tender care for the corpse of the deceased, and the release of the loved to the earth. The violent rupture of the heart! The resistance to this separation. These are the things that the world has cleanses when it hides death.
Seán Ó Tuama, in Repossessions, wrote about the tradition of the Wake in Ireland and in traditional cultures in Europe. Around 1959 in Southern Italy, in the province of Luciana, he tells how a waking takes place before and during the time of death. The mourners sit with the dying person and sob. At the moment of death they fling open the windows to let the spirit of the deceased out and open the doors to invite mourners in. They then “settle down for the harrowing hours of the watch when the women chant, one singing the virtues of the dead man, the others wailing the chorus. They tear their hair and claw their faces and weep until it seems they can mourn no more.”
Another account he cites from the town of Vallauris in southern France in the 1940s, tells how the keening women sit with the dying and help them recount their lives. One Keening woman described her work:
“We draw up our chairs alongside the bed. I might say, ‘do you remember, Ernest, the day of your first communion how little Mimi stood behind you and pulled your hair? I grew up with him and I remember those things. ‘Yes, yes, I remember he sobs’ and all three of us weepers groan and wail with him. Then it’s the next weepers turn. ‘Do you remember the day you left for your military service and you had to say goodbye to the family?’ If he says yes, then it’s the third ones turn, but if he says no we try again and add more and more details until he remembers. Sometimes it’s a really sad memory, like ‘Do you remember Julie, the time you lost your little girl from the coup at age three?’ When Julie cries her heart out we follow along like a chorus. If it’s a happy memory we all laugh. And it goes on like that through the whole life of the one who’s dying.”
This account from France in the 1940’s could not be more opposite to what French author, Michel Houellebecq, says has happened to France since the 1950s. In his latest book ‘Anihilation’ which is about deceit and narrative manipulation in the national and private lives of the French, he has this extraordinary piece as the main character faces his imminent death:
“It was quite recently that the codes of politeness that applied in Paul’s circles had come to include the obligation to conceal one’s own death. First of all it was illness in general that had become obscene… every illness, in a sense, was now a shameful illness, and fatal illness was the most shameful of all. As to death, it was the supreme indecency. Funeral ceremonies became shorter – and technical innovation in cremation meant that the process could be considerably concealed. Much more recently in the most enlightened and progressive strata of society, attempts had been made to sweep aside the last days as well. It had become inevitable, people who were dying had disappointed the hope that was placed in them, and they had often been reluctant to envisage their own passing as the opportunity for a huge party, and unpleasant episodes had ensued. In those conditions the most enlightened and progressive strata of society had agreed to pass over hospitalization in silence…. the decision in favour of euthanasia was generally taken within several weeks, or indeed within several days. The ashes were scattered anonymously”
Ó Tuama and Synge’s research are invaluable to us today, because while there is a vague awareness of the significance of the wake and the Caoineadh in our historic culture, there is very little detailed knowledge of what it actually entailed. -As a ritual what was it? How did it proceed and how did you take part?
The past is a distant country. What is clear is that this ritual is religious in nature and can only be a manifestation of a people aware of their spiritual nature.
What started me thinking on this subject was Fr. Trenham’s critique of the modern world’s fear of eternity (though it is thought of as a fear of mortality) and the sanitizing of the process of death. The modern minds paradigmatic ‘living for the present’ was one of the factors that led to the oppression of fear that enveloped our world during Covid, and it was this reaction that Fr. Trenham said had caused a counter reaction. Many witnesses to this madness of the crowd have rejected the godless world of modernity and its values. This rejection is being witnessed in the statistics of church attendance and the religious beliefs in the young in particular. The Nietzschian aphorism that “God is Dead” is resurrecting in a loss of faith in the New Gods of Science and the dogmas of secularism. If God was killed by science, science has since been dealt a chronic blow by a loss of faith.
At the start of this article I quoted some of Fr. Trenham’s speech, but what I left out was equally important. Trenham was talking about how the recent Covid aberration in reason – when fear of death caused many to let old people die alone and funerals to happen with no mourners – had caused people to question the new, and return to the old. Here is the remainder of his words:
“What a grotesque fruit of secularism. In fact, this revealing – this unveiling – of evil and death and the cultural upheaval associated with it. The awful hope destroying, joy dissolving, love abandoning fruit of secularism is being abandoned by many, many, people throughout the world. The awfulness of secularism, the worthlessness of a worldview that has driven the leadership of the Western world; these billionaire elites and their ridiculous theories and their contempt for traditional Western Christian civilisation; its seen in the raw now and people won’t have it. They’re done with it.
The combination of the inability to hide death in old folks homes together with the grotesque embrace of evil tyranny public violence, when our streets erupted in violence that was condoned even by our leadership. The eclipse of free speech, free movement, free press, freedom itself, was a stripping off of the mask of the Godless secularism that has been walking our western culture into oblivion.”
Lorcán Mac Mathúna