A few weeks ago, I was waiting at home for a long-expected, much-wanted plumber. (It’s become a joke that when we see a plumber’s van on the road in Dublin, someone says “follow that car”.) The plumber phoned about an hour before he was meant to arrive, and I feared the worst. But he was only saying he’d be late, maybe an hour or so, because he had to go to a funeral.
Are you sure you can still come? I said, mustering all the nobility I could find in me. Surely you’ll need some time off? I won’t be eating there, he said, I’m not going for the sandwiches, I just wanted you to know I might be late. If you’re really sure, I said, thank you.
I phoned an Irish friend for advice. Was it really okay for someone to go straight from a funeral to a job? Why was he telling me about the food, was it that he’d be skipping lunch as well as repressing distress to fix my taps, and should I offer a bowl of soup?
My friend explained, as she’s explained much in the last five years: not going to the meal meant that he wasn’t a close friend or family of the deceased, and that he was attending the funeral as a member of the community, to show respect and support for the bereaved, which was perfectly compatible with returning to work in the afternoon. She did not add, because we’d had the conversation before, that she finds the English approach to funerals and bereavement as unfathomable as I first found the Irish ways.
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In England, you can pretty much assume that anyone coming from a funeral will be upset, because they wouldn’t have gone otherwise. (Feelings and circumstances vary, of course; being family doesn’t necessarily mean terrible distress at someone’s passing, but it’s likely to involve emotion strong enough to impair professional judgment immediately afterwards.) I wouldn’t go to a friend’s parent’s funeral unless I knew the parent well, and I’ve never met most of my friends’ parents because we all left our hometowns 30 years ago. It would be strange and even intrusive to go to a colleague’s family funeral.
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At nearly 50, I have attended four funerals ever, which is probably fewer than average because I come of a small and scattered family, but not remarkable. I missed one family funeral for a job interview, and it didn’t occur to anyone that I should make any other choice; the funeral had already been postponed to allow for someone’s exams. Unless we’re Muslim or Jewish, in which case burial has to happen within a short time, English families tend to arrange funerals around existing commitments. It’s not as if the dead are in a rush.
There’s a case for the pragmatic approach, and it’s the one society expects. The dead indeed can and will wait, but grief doesn’t, and so the strange timeless days between death and ceremony stretch to weeks, as if exams and interviews mattered more than sorrow, as if keeping the machinery running should always be the first priority.
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In England, we’re generally not fluent in speaking of loss and dying; I learned here to say “I’m sorry for your loss”, because I’d grown up thinking one shouldn’t mention bereavement. The English approach – I’d hazard it’s similar in Scotland and Wales, but I don’t know – is rooted, I think, not so much in the dislike or suspicion of emotion as in the sense that feelings are private in relation to their intensity. That tendency seems cold to me now, but I think comes at best from the idea that it’s kinder not to upset someone, that a person newly returned to work or venturing out after a bereavement might be only just holding on to dignity and should not be required to respond to condolences. Least said, soonest mended.
It’s usually wrong, of course. These conventions leave people alone in sorrow, and reinforce the idea that sadness is dangerous and denial is the best approach. At worst, it’s merely convenient for employers and acquaintances not to have to bother themselves with the disturbing facts of life and death, to pretend we’re all cogs in the machine.
In this as in some other matters, I have come to prefer the Irish ways.
