Death is a funny old thing.
Everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. Even now death is going on up the road in your local hospital. Or round the corner with that neighbour found unblissfully dead in their sleep in their own bed. The tragic endings, we hopefully just get to read about in the papers, of the unhappy young, drugs, suicide. Lives lost, gone. The existential shock of the deaths of those you love. The Covid toll.
And then there is your own daily diet of death avoidance thoughts; not walking out in front of that bus and so avoiding being killed during your morning commute. Walking down the stairs carefully and thus not falling over and breaking your neck. And deliberately not choking yourself to death on too large a hunk of unchewed steak.
Death, our potential mortality, is refracted in some way in ever significant action of our lives yet we generally avoid any open confrontation, even preparation, for our inevitable extinction.
In Sorry for Your Trouble: The Irish Way of Death, Ann Marie Hourihane moves deathward against flow hunting death out in hospices, heroin gang murders, Islamic Irish funerals, suicide watches on the Cliffs of Moher and the mortal loss of her own pathologist father.
Hourihane’s writing is an elegiac trail moving from one puddle of pain and small tragedy to another; the fatal born child, the far too drunk young Irish men who at first laughed as the car interior began to fill with the flood water that would kill them, and the futile hunt for the remains of one of the IRA’s disappeared. The visceral sadness of the testimony of the survivors often weeps from the pages of her interview notes.
Celebrity funerals
Along the way of this seemingly purposeless tour, Hourihane dips as a reporter into the spectacle of various celebrity funerals: Big Tom, the famed country and western singer; Liam O’Flynn of Planxty; and delves deeper into family feuds over the memorial stones of the grave of the poet Patrick Kavanagh. Under some sense of mortal compulsion Hourihane even watches two cows being slaughtered.
Her journey into the land of Death ends in the minutiae of the last hours of her father; old, frail, suffering from Parkinson’s, declining slowly and then tumbling freely into death in the middle of the night with panicked calls from nursing homes, ambulance dashes to A&E and the cruelties of Covid PPE isolation. And then the end, abrupt, swift but no great medical surprise. The banality of what is likely to be for most of us our common fate.
In seeking to describe everything deathly, Sorry for Your Trouble flounders with the intent of the subtitle. Can we learn more about how the Irish deal specifically with death by the layering on of yet another tragic anecdote? The downloading of the entire contents of a sketch writer’s notebook? The death of cows?
More than any other western nation the Irish socialise death-in-life, in the wake, the RIP.ie roll call, the calling out of the names of the daily dead on local radio stations, the constant attendance at funerals and the repetition in a thousand handshakes of that very phrase “sorry for your trouble”. A acknowledgement of mortality, change, grief and loss.
Sacred mystery
Why the Irish peculiarly grip death so openly is a sacred mystery. Beyond our shores death is far more diminished, shielded from public view. In the UK the very sight of the dead is anathema, and the vast, vast, majority have never seen a corpse in their lives. Whereas an Irish citizen, regardless of their class, is likely still to see dozens if not hundreds of the dead in their own lifetime.
The mystery of the Irish way of death lies in this holding on to a funereal right as old as the fall of Troy, a web of perceived obligations and beliefs between the living and the dead. That we must, through a decent wake, funeral, a public show, lay the fallen to rest and by default educate ourselves and our children in how to conduct ourselves in our mortality. The bodies of the dead still matter in a way they very much do not in the UK and in the US.
Ultimately, a sense entirely missing from Sorry for Your Trouble, the Irish way of death persists because the Irish, whatever the rest of their differences, still feel a sense of obligation, even a forgiveness, towards each other in death that requires their living presence at wakes, funerals and that long trail of handshakes and whispered condolences. So sorry indeed for your troubles.
Kevin Toolis is the writer of My Father’s Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love and Die
