Ireland

D is for Death

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Does Death give Meaning to Life?

My mother served in the Second World War as a signaling Sergeant and she said that over the course of the war, there were six men, any of whom she might have made a life with if they hadn’t gone off to where the action was and never come back. In that sentence, I have not used the word death, but you know what I mean. Death is the elephant in the room. My mother had certainly had enough of it and so, when my grandparents died, the first people I knew who died, my sisters and I were not allowed to go to the funeral – my mother did not want to expose us to death. Those funerals were the proper hole in the ground in an English country churchyard funerals. Soon after that though, funerals in England moved, mostly, to being cremations. A poll in 2016 showed that 75% of people in the UK prefer cremation. Whether it is the cost, £1000 more on average, for a traditional funeral; the move away from religion and thus church burials; the lack of space in churchyards – I don’t know the answer to why we have moved away from burials to cremations. But I do know one of the effects of this switch and that is the waiting list that means it can be three or four weeks between a person dying and the catharsis of a funeral.

Why does this wait make a difference? Well in 1995 I went to live in Ireland and at first I was deceived by the fact that everyone spoke “English”, into thinking that the culture was also similar. I mean if you went to France and had to learn to speak a different language, then you would also expect the culture to be different too. So the first thing that made me appreciate the difference in Ireland, was the way of death, or rather, what happens when someone dies. Firstly the word goes out to all relatives and significant friends. Everyone drops what they are doing, all over Ireland and even abroad and by the evening, everyone is at the deceased’s home in time for a service where the body arrives at the church. The night will be spent remembering the person and the next day, everyone goes to another service and the coffin is processed by all the mourners to the local burial ground. Another difference – the burial grounds are usually multi-denominational and the churchyards are not usually used for graves. The party or wake may then continue for the next night or more… Now the Postmaster whose mother had passed at that first Irish funeral I encountered, told me he had been going to funerals in his village all his life but this was the first time he had been at the receiving end of one. For the first time, he realized how supportive it was to have all the family around him so quickly. Contrast this with the three-week wait in England and a quick service at a crematorium in whatever religious denomination you require and another group of mourners lining up outside as you complete. It might only be my opinion, but I feel that in England, we are particularly detached from death.

My partner, on the other hand, feels that the Irish are naturally more demonstrative and that the English have always been more reserved rather than any effect of the war and that children were not taken to funerals because they were not regarded as mature enough for the experience – take your pick or any other answers on a postcard (comment box)…

So different cultures respond differently or if not differently, then in degree, to death both in terms of emotion, practices of remembrance and of religious rituals – but is there some essential similarity? Well, evidence of burying the dead is often taken to be the sign of transition from ape to hominid – a sign that our big brains had developed to the point of self-consciousness where we could imagine an afterlife or conceptualize the preciousness of the Ancestor or simply identify with a corpse and not wish to leave it unburied and prey to animals. All these things require acts of imagination, feats of language and co-operation, all signs of big brain development or to put it another way, funereal arrangements are fundamental to being human.

The Covid 19 is having a very distressing effect as people are essentially dying alone, being buried without ceremony and as so often, when we are deprived of something, we appreciate what we have lost much more. Will we find new ways to celebrate the passing of relatives and friends and strangers?

At the end of the last post, I suggested that life has no intrinsic meaning and I stand by that, but the way that we treat our dead shows that humans create their own meanings, light their own flames of imagination, art, scientific enquiry and philosophy in the dark vastness of the universe. How long that flame will burn given the way we are treating the planet is open to question but as the warnings of Greta Thunberg are temporarily eclipsed by the Covid 19 crisis, there is a little hope in that crisis. Pollution is down, businesses being re-configured, priorities are being re-assessed at all levels from the individual to governments. We are pausing to draw breath and consider where we find ourselves. It’s not all good news though, the forces of repression are trying to claw more influence through emergency powers but then more people have time to scrutinize everything. Who knows where we will be on the other side of the crisis, but we live in interesting times…