November is the month of the dead for Catholics and we say masses for dead people and think about them. I am not normally a big fan of Michael Harding who has a quirky column in the Irish Times but he had a lovely column the other day about visiting the cemetery which I would link to, if their paywall policy was not weaponised. I’m going to Cork at the weekend, and this article has reminded me that it might be a good opportunity to visit the cemetery where my aunt and my parents, and indeed my Cork great-grandparents and almost all their children are buried (my grandmother and grandfather were buried elsewhere with his people).
I often think of my beloved Limerick grandmother in November. Her birthday was November 25th and I can still remember how excited I felt whenever she came to visit. Limerick was a lot further away in those days and when she travelled to our house in Cork she came for long visits of (is it possible?) up to a month at a time. I loved it when she stayed. She was just a delight. I may have mentioned that the children pointed out to me that I am so old that not only do I know someone who was born in the 1800s but I am old enough to miss someone born in the 1800s. This has given me pause for thought.
My mother-in-law’s first anniversary is coming up. My father-in-law and my own parents are long gone. I mean, am I next for take off? Let’s not be morbid here, but this quote really spoke to me:
Always lots of funerals available in Ireland. Someone emailed me about a former colleague’s father (“I knew you’d want to know” – did you? did you really?). I decided to ignore it until I got a further email from someone else about the same man so I reached into my pile of sympathy cards and wrote a nice note. I personalised it, talked about how hard it was so soon after his wife’s mother’s death; how difficult it must be for the children. I addressed it. I came very close to posting it when I suddenly realised that I was thinking of a completely different person with the same slightly unusual first name. It took a lot out of me.
I sent a whatsapp message to another former colleague who is now distinguishing himself elsewhere. It’s a bit weird on whatsapp because you see a profile picture in a personal context and if you only know someone from work, it can be a surprise. He had a profile picture of himself and his mother to whom I knew he was very close. In between congratulating him on the new role, I commented on the lovely profile picture. I think you know where this is going. She had died since I saw him last over the summer. Apparently this is a thing, if someone’s parent dies they use pictures of the parent and themselves as the whatsapp profile photo. I only tell you this so that you don’t have to suffer similar embarrassment to me.
So you know my view on the unnecessary funeral information. However, my friend in America’s father has been ill for the past 6 months but managing ok. She was over and back a fair bit and I asked her to let me know, if anything happened. Then she texted me one Sunday to say her father had died the previous Wednesday. I instantly began calculating when the funeral would be. Provided it wasn’t the next Wednesday, I felt I could move things and make it (it was in Cork). Then she added that the funeral had been the day before. I was gutted. Saturday is a very convenient day for a funeral in Cork and she is one of my oldest friends. I frequently stayed in her parents’ house in west Cork during the summers. I would have wanted to know. But what was I to do? Upbraid her for not telling me earlier? She didn’t want to inconvenience me but I really wanted to be inconvenienced. I had actually considered putting an alert on rip.ie (a thing!) but it just seemed too weird. I was sure that news would reach me through the inevitable grapevine but it did not. Alas. And now I have a card to write to her and another for her mother and I am finding it quite hard. Yes, it is all about me. Your point? I remember many years ago when I started my blog my friend mocking the “About” bit saying, it’s all about you.
And finally in funeral news, Mr. Waffle’s friend’s father died. They live right at the bottom of Wicklow. A good two hours drive away. Mr. Waffle couldn’t go to the funeral on Tuesday due to a work commitment so he went to the removal on Monday night (my friend says no one in England knows what a removal is – can this be true? – it’s a service the evening before the funeral). I knew all this. But yet, I promised my friend around the corner a lift to bookclub 10kms away and when I came out of the house at 7, I was surprised to find the car wasn’t there. We may be looking at compartmentalisation. Which, by the way, is a good way to deal with thoughts of the inevitable.
In 4 years I will have lived longer than my mother
I think about becoming older now far more than I think about dying
Huh. Strange getting older isn’t it?
I learn something new here so often about death and all the formalities in Ireland, not being flippant when I say that. I’d never heard of a “removal” before. Why did my grandmother (born in Cavan) not tell me any of these customs? It seems to me the Irish have a far healthier approach to death than we English do. A BBC Radio 4 programme discussed this not so long ago. Quite how you manage to arrange funerals/cremations so quickly is beyond me. My mother passed away 18 months ago and it was a month before we had her funeral – family members on holiday, moving house and the crematorium was booked solid (!). I can almost laugh at it now but at the time when trying to arrange it was at my wits end.
I did not know you were a quarter Ulster. To be fair I am not sure that removal is a term used in Protestant circles, however the concept definitely exists as the “removal” my husband went to on Monday night was for a Protestant man (C of I). In the interests of science I inquired of a colleague from Northern Ireland (also C of I) whether they had removals and he thought not. He’s too young to have the level of funeral experience I’m familiar with. But I suppose there may be some kind of North/South divide there.
I suppose the timing thing is what everyone is used to. It’s a bit like organising a wedding in three days (ad in the paper, church, music, hotel for dinner, missalette). The undertaker is your right hand man/woman. They are fantastic. So you run around like crazy in the couple of days after the death. You meet loads of people. And then it’s done and you can process it all without having the funeral hanging over you. The only conceivable reason for more than a couple of days (aside from autopsy, I guess) are that a child is travelling from abroad and then absolute maximum delay is about a week. I don’t know how the crematoriums etc manage but the idea of waiting a month seems crazy to us. I am v amused by the prospect of the funeral by invitation only which is unheard of here. It is accepted that if a colleague’s parent dies a group from the office will head out to the funeral for a couple of hours.
One thing – related – is that I have seen more dead bodies than I can remember. And my kids have seen a good few too. It somehow demystifies things a bit to be sitting by the open coffin in the good room with a cup of tea in your hand chatting away to a friend.