Mourning Status
As in the world of show business, with its convenient celebrity status listings, it is helpful to divide the mourners at a funeral into categorically distinct groups using the same alphabetic system favoured by the stars. A-list mourners are those who are genuinely bereaved. They include the spouse or lover, siblings, parents, children and real friends, who are devastated by their loss to the extent that they cannot really enjoy the funeral per se. Obviously no one wants to be an A-list mourner because grief gets in the way of what is otherwise a very social occasion.
For the purpose of detailing the rules governing attending funerals, I am only concerned with B-list mourners and below. You can qualify as a B-list mourner where, for example, the deceased was a seldom-seen relative, an in-law you didn’t like, or an aunt or uncle from whom you have reasonable hope of a small legacy. A-listers who have inherited very large amounts of money from close relatives may qualify as B-list mourners because they may enjoy the event despite appearances. C-list mourners are those in attendance at the funeral of a relative of a friend or those at their boss’s funeral. D-list mourners include distant relatives, friends of friends and those mourning a newly discovered distant cousin who died while those D-listers were in Ireland on holiday. D-listers also include the elderly who are happily burying each other as a day out of the house. As a general rule, the further down the alphabet you are, the more likely you are to enjoy the funeral.
The Travel and Dress Rules
It is not necessary for C-list and lower mourners to travel long distances to attend funerals. One’s connection with the deceased should be carefully calculated against the distance to the funeral. Funeral attendance etiquette demands that A-list mourners must travel any distance, while hangers-on and funeral groupies should confine themselves to within a distance of twenty kilometres to the grave. Anything above that will appear as social desperation and probably qualifies as perverse.
When considering the appropriate distance to travel for a funeral, it is also worth considering the dress code. Low-grade mourners should ideally wear dark colours such as navy and brown, but not black. Only the A-list mourners should wear black ties. Bright colours and cocktail dresses along with feather boas and fascinators should also be avoided. While funerals can be enjoyable occasions, it is important to maintain the proper façade of respectful seriousness until at least the after-burial drinking session, where you are allowed to laugh out loud.
Similarly, when it comes to the expression of grief, B-listers and below should be careful to mourn at the precise appropriate level. B-listers flinging themselves into graves after the coffin in inconsolable grief will only give rise to speculation or gossip.
Divorce in Irish society has produced the complication of whether the ex-spouse or the current spouse can claim to be the main mourner. It is not unheard of for fights to break out as to who is the most bereaved. Remember, in theory there is no limit to the permissible number of A-list mourners allowed to fight with each other at your funeral.
Funeral Stages
Depending on your mourning status, there are different stages of the funeral you may be obliged to attend. The first stage is where the corpse reposes or is laid out. The deceased reposes in one of three locations. They may be put on show in a funeral home if they are relatively poor and have a small or unattractively furnished house; in a funeral parlour if the deceased is equally poor but has social aspirations; or in their own home, or residence if they don’t have a home, if they are either well-off or bohemian and don’t care about their furniture. It is permissible to openly enjoy the repose as a B-lister and below.
The second stage, following repose, is where the body is moved to a church in a ceremony called the removal. This happens even in the case of strident atheists who have left strict instructions not to be removed to a church. In contemporary Ireland there are humanistic funerals, but I was unable to find one for the purposes of this research. However, I have attended the removal of a Jewish corpse to a Catholic church.
Finally, there is the burial itself, which involves the funeral proceeding to the graveyard or crematorium where the body is buried or burned. We are even promised the possibility of having eco-friendly burials in the near future.
Each of these three formal stages involves a variety of forms of socialising. It is acceptable to attend one, two or all three parts, depending on your status as mourner. B- and C-list mourners may choose to attend both the repose and the evening removal of the remains to the church the night before the burial, or they may only attend the burial itself and the reception afterwards. D-listers and lower hangers-on generally attend all parts of the funeral without any self-consciousness or shame.
Reposing Rules
For research, I travelled to West Cork to attend the funeral of a distant relative as a B-list mourner. By normal convention I should have attended as a C-lister, but I boosted myself up one notch for the sake of anthropology. In normal circumstances, I might not have bothered because of the distance and poor roads, but the responsibilities of ethnographic research got the better of me.
The deceased, Joe-Pat, was a farmer who had accumulated a fine spread of grassland over the five decades of his farming career. He was the youngest of four siblings, with three unmarried sisters. He had also never married. All four lived together harem-like in the farmhouse and each of the sisters actively competed for their brother’s affection. Platonic, of course. I remember the domestic scene from the rare occasions on which I visited. Each sister would rise earlier and earlier in the morning in order to be the one who made him his morning cup of tea. Those who were beaten to the breakfast would travel to the nearby town to select some titbits to enhance his lunchtime meal or a small gift of socks or underwear that would be preheated on the radiator before being allowed to warm the appropriate extremity. While he was a hard-working farmer, the sisterly rivalry had turned him into a domestic incompetent.
Joe-Pat had built a big house for the four of them on top of a hill for the specific purposes of being able to see his land from all his windows and – just as important – to be seen. In some countries farmers hide themselves and their houses behind hills and screens of trees to shelter from the wind and weather. Those farmers are invariably modest minded and unassuming but ultimately anti-social, because anyone lost or needing help will not know where to find them. My cousin liked to be seen. While immodest and pretentious, he was also social and generous to strangers who could easily find the highly illuminated hilltop house if lost or needing cups of tea. In the words of one of his neighbours, ‘He was that kind of man you wouldn’t know what kind of man he was, if you know what I mean?’
The hacienda is the architectural template for many vernacular farmhouses built in Ireland since the 1970s. The Southfork ranch, in the television series Dallas, has also provided design inspiration. Both these influences are present in my cousin’s farmhouse. A narrow road winds around the hill up to the house, which only comes fully into view at the very last bend. Driving up to the house at 11.00 a.m., I saw my dead cousin in an upright coffin, plainly visible through the sitting-room window, enjoying a final inspection of both his land and the mourners coming to view him in repose.
I had dressed in discreet grey for my posing as a B-list mourner. The instant I stepped through the front door, I was handed a glass of whisky, a thick slice of tipsy cake and a turkey sandwich. The repose was well underway.
The Never-Speak-Ill-of-the-Dead Rule
When first confronting the corpse laid out on a bed or on the kitchen door or, in this instance, standing up in a coffin by the window, it is important to be complimentary about its appearance. This rule of complimenting the corpse is part of the general rule that you should never speak ill of the dead, no matter how public or notorious their shortcomings. Helpfully, in the context of commenting on a corpse’s appearance, there is a range of standard expressions. These, no matter how seemingly incongruous, may well be true. This is their virtue. Th
ey include: ‘He has never looked better a day in his life’; ‘He is the picture of health’; ‘She looks like she is sleeping’; ‘You wouldn’t know there was anything the matter with her’; ‘I had no idea he was such a handsome man.’ Frankness and honesty in general are definitely not called for. Expressions such as ‘He won’t be bothered by that unsightly growth now’, ‘I didn’t realise he was so wrinkly up-close’ and ‘How much did you say he left you?’ should not be used even when drunk at a later stage of the funeral.
Once you have complimented the corpse you can move on to enquiring about the circumstances of the death. It is customary to enquire in a general way with the question ‘What in God’s name happened?’ A general enquiry should lead to a detailed description of the death, involving X-rays, where available; an hour-by-hour diary of the final day with all of the who-said-what-to-whom; and detailed medical notes. In my cousin’s case, I already knew that he had, according to the Indo, died peacefully in his sleep, but I was naturally curious about the details. As it happened, he had fallen from the barn roof, while nailing down sheets of corrugated iron in a high wind, just two days after getting home from hospital where he had a heart bypass operation. He had indeed passed away peacefully, following two weeks in a vegetative coma. His sisters had argued bitterly amongst each other about which one of them would turn off the life-support machine. When they agreed it would be murder, they fought to avoid the responsibility. When they were subsequently persuaded that it would be a mercy, they fought with each other for the privilege.
Once the circumstances of death are established, you can move on to general conversation. It is customary to avoid discussing your positive future plans, the meaning of life or anything to do with being alive in general. Standing in front of the corpse is not a good place to hold forth on novel existential insights into the meaning of life, nor is it an occasion to query the value of the life just completed by the deceased. If you have a view on his eternal damnation, you should keep it to yourself. Saying, as one drunken mourner said of his dead neighbour, ‘I am not surprised that he looks a bit hot now’ is socially inappropriate. Your choice of conversation should be suitably glib or innocuous. As a general rule, in the Irish context, the more profoundly life-changing the occasion, the more innocuous the observation required. The stupefied silence of the traumatised witnesses to a major disaster can be overcome by the suggestion that you put on the kettle and make a cup of tea.
When I arrived, my cousins, the sisters, were in the process of reproaching each other about whose fault it was that their brother was on the barn roof during a storm. Each volunteered that they should have ascended the rounded roof of the barn to nail down the loose iron sheets herself. Each said that she would gladly take her brother’s place in the vertical coffin if she could: ‘I would be gone now, but he would still be here with his remaining sisters’; ‘He is the greater loss.’ It is essential not to attribute blame to any of the principal mourners at a funeral by actively agreeing with these superficial utterances. While you can think what you like, you should never give your thoughts voice. Stick with broad observations: ‘Didn’t he go peacefully in the end?’, ‘marvellous age’, ‘great life’ and ‘better to go while still independent’ are all acceptable mutterings while viewing the body in repose. These expressions can be thrown into any part of a conversation with an A-list mourner, whether you are drunk or actually still sober. Asking for copies of biopsy reports and an exact time-line of the so-called accident or actually voicing your suspicions of foul play can wait until you meet the D-listers drinking in the kitchen.
A group will usually sit around the coffin to help you along with these awkward mumblings, and you can join them when you have completed your formal viewing of the body. Alternatively, you can retreat to the kitchen, find a quiet corner in which to hide, and drink with the D-listers. When not hiding in the kitchen, hangers-on should occupy the most visible perches. It is acceptable for B-list mourners to commence drinking and eating almost immediately. Loud laughter should be delayed for as long as possible. When it does break out, it should be confined to fellow B-listers and below.
The D-list mourners in the kitchen at my cousin’s wake informed me that I had missed a row that broke out amongst the sisters over how their brother should be dressed in his coffin. One sister had insisted that he wear a favourite light blue woollen v-neck jumper under his suit, while another sister insisted that he would roast in that, as it was one of the warmest autumns in years. ‘I suppose it depends on which way he’s going: up or down,’ one D-lister observed.
It is important for social harmony at a funeral to identify and hang out with your own level of mourner and below if you are not on the A-list. Ideally, you are allowed to socialise down the mourning league but not up. Lower level mourners should only speak to higher-level mourners when addressed by them. Fellow guests will quickly try to establish your mourning status by asking you directly how you know the deceased. They might ask, ‘Who are you, now?’ or ‘What connection do you have with Joe-Pat?’
It is common for a number of mourning siblings not be on speaking terms with either each other or the deceased. This silence often dates back to unsuitable youthful marriages or, more commonly, land-based disputes. However, once a sibling you have not spoken to for twenty or more years dies, you should feel free to attend the funeral as the most grief-stricken A-list mourner. Cry and wail with everything you have. You should remember the don’t-speak-ill-of-the-dead rule and confine yourself to only positive anecdotes on the life and times of the deceased.
Funeral Food Rules
While alcohol is a vital social lubricant at Irish funerals, food also plays an important role. If you are unable to drink because you are a designated driver, you are permitted to become obsessed with the food. When someone dies, particularly in rural areas, the neighbours bring offerings of food to the house of the deceased. These donations should be traditional Irish dishes or at least recognised as being traditional, considering there is very little variety in vernacular cooking. The food should be conservative and not draw attention to itself or boast of any culinary accomplishments on the part of the cooks. Do not bring ethnic or nouvelle cooking to a wake unless you are an established artist with an international reputation. Standard conservative cooking to suit the occasion includes roasted meats of any domesticated animal. Hare, rabbit and wild fowls, including pigeons, are not acceptable. Beef, lamb, turkey and chicken are all acceptable if overcooked. Chicken can often appear undercooked, adding to the general awareness of the fragility of life that can dominate our thinking at funerals. Ham is a mainstay but not in carbonara. Duck a l’orange is also out. In fact, forget about duck in general. Curry, if mild, is okay, while white-bread sandwiches and cakes are particularly welcome. Any form of dessert generously smothered in whipped cream will not invite negative comment.
Standard reposing, or waking, activities include singing, crying, card playing and storytelling. At one wake I attended, the traditional ghost stories were replaced by accounts of alien abductions of neighbouring farmers and a traffic accident involving a flying saucer that was reported to the local Gardaí, so it must be true. Aliens are abducting an alarming number of farmers across Ireland.
Removal Rules
The next day, it is time to put the lid on the coffin and follow the hearse to the church. Obviously, this is one of the most difficult parts of the funeral for the bereaved. In the case of Joe-Pat’s sisters, I wanted to give them privacy. However, I was too slow in making my exit and found myself, with one or two other stragglers, locked into the room with the upright coffin, the undertaker, Joe-Pat and his sisters. The sisters circled the coffin, each one kissing Joe-Pat and saying her farewells. However, the first sister came round the back of the coffin and kissed Joe-Pat again, with slightly more passion, and motioned to the undertaker standing by with the lid that he should put it on now. Before he could move, the second sister ducked in her head and gave Joe-Pat one last kiss. Not to be out
done, the third sister kissed him again and the first sister went straight back around for round three. This circling of the coffin lasted several minutes before the undertaker dived in between the sisters, pushing them aside, and screwed on the lid, shouting, ‘Enough now. That’s enough kissing.’
Once the coffin is in the hearse and it is moving off, the local politicians will make an appearance. They will join the A-list mourners, sometimes walking in front of the hearse but always openly sobbing. From a sociological point of view, I assume their grief is at the loss of a voter. An ideal time to strategically join the funeral is when the cortege reaches the church and the main mourners are seated inside according to rank. Attending this part of the removal is the best way to be seen with the least input. It is customary to offer your condolences at this point. Make your way along the rows of mourners, shaking each hand and muttering, ‘Sorry for your loss.’ In the case of being actually sorry, you can say, ‘Very sorry for your loss.’ When you reach what you consider to be the C-listers, stop shaking hands.
Grave Rules
If you are an A-list mourner, you may be entitled to participate in the inevitable row that will break out over family graves. This is particularly important to older generations who have been planning their funerals for decades or to siblings who are no longer on speaking terms. A traditional form of marriage proposal was to ask your intended if she would like to be buried with your people. Surprisingly, not taking this as a threat, the woman would agree if she wanted to get married. The introduction of divorce has complicated the issue of family graves. The basic principle is that, if the plot is big enough, lifelong enemies can be buried with the more conciliatory relatives lying in between, forming a peace-line between the rival factions.
How to Be Irish Page 2