Making sense of death in life

At my most pious, aged about 12, I loved Lent. We were not a daily Mass-going house, but I cycled alone to Mass before breakfast every morning. Out in the spring sunshine, fasting, I discovered a virtuous high. The ceremonies of Holy Week were as much a sensory as a spiritual experience: statues cowled in purple cloths, dust motes circling in the shafts of sunshine, a sense of warmth returning.

The great Christian feasts fit by intent with the cycles of nature in the Northern hemisphere. Easter's themes of death and resurrection find harmony with nesting birds, spring lambs and Easter eggs. There is even a consoling paradox in celebrating Christ's birth at the dying time of the year and his death at the time of birth.

When the majority of Irish society wore ashes on Ash Wednesday, joined in the Holy Week ceremonies and believed in the resurrection, I wonder whether we were on better terms with death than we are now. Or in the ceremonies did we manage to hand death over to the professionals, to reinforce the taboo and distance ourselves from death's reality? Certainly, the efforts of some Catholic leaders to detach the laity's hold from the rituals surrounding death, to ban eulogies and personal offerings, would seem designed to keep the interpretation of death - and, in the process, life - as the professionals' preserve.

Now my post-Vatican II generation expresses spirituality in diverse ways. Some are still Catholics, albeit a la carte, others Christian but eschewing the Catholicism of Pope John Paul II, some spiritual but rejecting organised religion, still others brave enough to shape their own meaning as agnostics and humanists, few indeed orthodox in a way our grandparents' generation would have understood. For all the talk of growing materialism, I doubt many of us live utterly unexamined lives. The very need to take a view on the upheavals within the Catholic Church has forced us to define our own spirituality, to find a set of beliefs which works, at least to be going along with. Our personal compromises can be challenged when we seek schools for our children in the denominational education system but, in a very Irish way, within that system we co-exist.

What happens, though, when we are really tested? Having taken our spirituality back from the professionals, how do we face the ultimate taboo and, in the face of death, find meaning in our finite lives?

At the dying time of the year, when the days were darkest and our house was intent on celebration, my grand-uncle came to last December's Christmas dinner, became gravely ill and died a few hours later in the neighbouring hospital. Dear, legendary, courageous, controversial, tough as nails and with a faith like granite, that was my 94-year-old uncle Aedan McGrath. He had been a Columban missionary for most of his life, had been imprisoned in China in the 1950s and was active to the end. One of three of my grandfather's brothers who joined the Columbans, he came from an Irish generation which believed fervently in the rightness of Catholicism and an imperative to convert the world. Not for him the liberation theology embraced by later Columbans: he enlisted the laity through the Legion of Mary.

On the day of his death, four generations spanning 90 years briefly shared our house. In those 11 people, I imagine there was as wide a spectrum of belief and unbelief as you would find in any Irish house on Christmas Day. We were united in love, in shock, and from the youngest to the oldest, in facing our mortality.

Because it was Christmas Day and we were all together, because my uncle loved to be active despite his failing health, we experienced a close shared encounter with death which must once have been the norm for Irish families, but which hospital and nursing home care and fragmented living has made more rare. That night contemplating how we all, adults and children, would cope with our grief, I turned to a book, Helping Your Child Through Bereavement, by psychotherapist Mary Paula Walsh.

Here were many practical answers to my questions. "The younger the child the more difficult it is for them to grasp the reality and permanence of death. It is difficult for us all. Seeing the deceased is probably the single most helpful thing for children."

So it was that, in the Columban College near Navan with the snow falling outside, we visited my uncle lying in the Chinese parlour between cabinets housing carvings in ivory. His supportive and sensitive community offered crisps and Coke with the tea in an adjoining room. "Every religion and culture and every family has its own way of regarding life and death, its own belief system," Walsh writes. "You will naturally want to pass yours on to your children. This time of bereavement is one of the times you get the opportunity to do that in a direct way." Without the certainties of earlier generations, we may fear to admit that we do not know all the answers. But most of us are sustained in the face of our mortality by personal beliefs, however evolving, however seldom articulated. Questioned by grieving children, we owe them and ourselves the courage to confront death and find a way to express and pass on the beliefs which keep us alive.

Helping Your Child Through Bereavement by Mary Paula Walsh is published by Veritas.

mawren@irish-times.ie