Niamh Towey: ‘It’s time I took classes in Funeral 101’

‘You can go ahead of me now, I don’t know them as well as you do,” my mother said to me before we had even parked the car outside the funeral home.

My heart sank. When she first agreed to accompany me to the memorial, which was in a town I was not familiar with, it had relieved my anxieties about funeral procedures.

Mum will know what to do, I thought. I’ll just copy her. But now here she is, petulantly refusing to let me cower behind her cloak of adulthood.

I mean, what do you say? Do you shake everyone’s hands, or just those you know? Should you kiss the corpse?

We began an impromptu funeral lesson in the queue: “Well, I usually say sorry for your loss, but your uncle-in-law told me he just says ‘condolences’ now. So you could say that too.”

My mother’s brother-in-law is a man well practised in funeral civilities and probably seen by her as a reliable source. His single-word strategy seemed like a bold one, but maybe it could work . . . I was panicking now.

Funerals always make me a little uncomfortable, yet they are something I think we do quite well in Ireland. There is something soothing about the ritual of the wake, funeral home, service and burial.

There is comfort in the refrain of the rosary, a sense of being in control of a situation which can often leave those grieving feeling as if the centre has fallen out of the world.

A child killed on the road, a husband overwhelmed by depression, a mother killed by cancer. Ours is a world which can serve up unimaginable horror and loss, yet in those days following such shock we cling to ritual as a remedy to the chaos.

Generations before us have done this, generations after us will do the same.

Standing outside the funeral home, I was left wondering at what point I would become at one with all of this custom and not have to ask my mother for the best handshake strategy. She and all the other adults in my life really seem to know their stuff when it comes to funeral etiquette.

On the local radio station at home in Roscommon there is a daily reading of the death notices. My uncle calls them Mid-West’s version of the ‘Top 10’. You take your life in your hands if you talk over the Top 10, much like you would if you had talked over the weather.

God forbid you rob them of their chance to argue over who Billy-Joe-Mac was that passed away at 87 years of age over in Bochta Dubh. It generally goes like this:

Towey A: “Sure wasn’t it his son who built that lovely stonework house up past the old Mill in Barnaboy?”

Towey B: “No, no, no, for God’s sake. That’s a totally different family of Joe-Mac’s you’re thinking of. The ones with the priest who used to teach in the brothers. They’re from up Redman’s Boheen, you eejit.”

Towey A: “You’re right, sure wasn’t Billy the one from Slieveroe with the lovely garden that he kept immaculately? Well I suppose we better go to that funeral anyways. I wouldn’t like to meet that sister and not have sympathised with her.”

The adults in my life seem to go to a hell of a lot of funerals. They always qualify their reason for attendance with: "Well, I wouldn't like to meet [insert distant relative's name here] and not have sympathised with them".

Perhaps that is why they are so well versed in the mechanics of such things. Or maybe it is an example of how a small community rallies around one another in hard times.

Anybody in our town who has ever experienced grief will probably tell you of the support they received during the funeral from people they didn’t even know. There are often queues up the street of Ballaghaderreen waiting to get into the funeral home to sympathise – and that is how it has always been.

For particularly tragic funerals, such as that of someone young, the handshaking at the funeral home service can seem like a marathon which goes on for hours and hours, and must be exhausting for the family. Yet I imagine that seeing faces you never expected to see and having the swell of a small town pass through the door just to wish you well must be an incredible crutch of support in a time of such loneliness.

As a nation, we do not ignore grief or hide it, but deal with it in a very ceremonial and solemn way, which is healthy and healing.

The fact that I have managed to write an entire column just about funeral customs is testament to our national preoccupation with the rituals surrounding death. Or maybe it just speaks volumes about my morbid unconscious.

Either way, I’ve decided it is time I took classes in Funeral 101 so I no longer have to quiver behind my mother in handshaking queues or worry about the most fashionable message of consolation.