A time when many of us just miss saying that last goodbye

Maybe it’s an age thing, but for want of a better expression, I’m more into funerals than weddings.

We mightn’t do everything right in Ireland but in terms of giving a send-off to our loved ones, I think we tick a lot of the boxes.

Only in the last couple of months has this really hit home to me when the great Irish funeral tradition also fell victim to the coronavirus.

Friends and neighbours who I had known back the years just slipped away from us almost silently and without a hand being shook or a graveyard visited.

Once or twice, I’ve attended funerals in places like England where I always thought there was a coldness and lack of feeling about the final goodbye that was just . . . well pretty bleak.

There is of course no way of dressing up the Grim Reaper in bright clothes but yet there is something consoling for family and friends when a loved one gets a tender and loving send-off.

We all have to stop for death and even if we don’t, as Emily Dickinson put it, he will ‘kindly stop for you’.

Back the years, at the death beds of elderly relatives, I’ve been one of the group that recited Hail Mary after Hail Mary, and it’s a little prayer – even in my less than fertile spiritual periods – that does bring its own solace.

Maybe it goes back to that infant and early childhood link we all had with our mothers but there always seems to be just a little feeling of warmth and consolation in the second half of the prayer: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.”

There’s a sincerity of spirit and solidarity at Irish funerals with a poignant oscillation between joy and utter sadness as the event runs its course.

The playing of a favourite song at the church or graveyard can ignite an explosion of memories, and while the human finality of the occasion can never be overcome, the droplets of consolation from the fountains of friendship most of us can draw from, can be a help.

Over recent weeks – and indeed months now – there have been funerals of neighbours and friends that I (like everyone else) have missed because of the health restrictions.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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