The Irish wake: dark humor and a 4 a.m. Nip
By Michael J. Carroll
Published: March 16, 2019
(Press Enterprise)
I don’t know many priests these days. They were a big presence in my life — formidable, sometimes frightening for my first decade and a half or so — but not since. I still know one, Father Mac, whom I worked with on a political asylum case a few decades back. He is still strong in spirit, maybe faltering a little in body since he reached the other side of 80. He was always hardworking, working for the underdog the world ignored except when it paused to kick it.
One thing I treasure about Mac is his Irish sense of humor. Maybe it’s more accurate to say Irish-American, a close cousin to Irish that has grown in its own distinctive direction over the years. Father Mac’s personality was formed growing up in Philadelphia with highlights contributed by his mother, who was from Girardville in the Coal Region of Schuylkill County.
Christmas can no longer mean toys for me, although I do secretly crave fancy flashlights and other gadgets. I see those little toy helicopters that really fly and wonder if I would look all that silly playing with one. Too bad my kids are in their 20s. They could have once provided useful cover if I claimed I bought it for them. Years ago my father bought a Lionel toy train set, FOR ME, of course, certainly not for him.
Anyone Irish and anyone acquainted with the tribe knows that one of the ways they grapple with death is through humor.
Years ago I called Father Mac to pass on the sad news that Jim, whom I had worked with at the Legal Services office and who had religious ties with him, had died young and unexpectedly.
Mac answered the phone and I started in with “I’m sorry to tell you that Jim died over the weekend.”
He cut me off before I could give details: “You’re not sorry, Carroll. You’re Irish. You love to deliver news like this.”
He had a point, not one that applied to me of course, but to those other Irish! If you are numbered among the Irish or their friends and fellow travelers, you see truth in his remark. You probably know at least one person of Irish descent who gets on the phone to spread sad news before the dearly departed is cold.
Mac followed up with:
“I always said that Jim was the best lawyer at legal services.”
He knew only two, of course, Jim and me.”
When I was growing up in Mount Carmel, the dead were not always hidden. I was a child at the end of the era when deceased family members were “laid out” at home in “the parlor.” In my father’s small homestead the body of my grandmother rested while friends and family dropped by to console and pay respects before her final earthly journey to Saint Mary’s Cemetery just outside of town.
At the home wakes, and later at the funeral parlors that replaced them, there was ritual conversation interspersed with recitation of the Rosary.
“Sorry for your trouble.”
There was also the obligatory compliment conveying how good and natural the deceased looked. Never mind the waxy makeup and the inescapable and contradictory fact that the person had looked considerably better just a short time earlier... while still alive.
There was also the funereal competition for the apparently coveted title of “Last One to See the Departed Alive.” As in a game of poker, the players might conceal their own hands — the time of their last meeting or sighting of the decedent — while measuring the claims of other players, hoping to win with a later encounter. ”
An opening move might go something like this:
“Why I just saw him last Saturday. He looked fit as a fiddle.”
A second player could counter with:
“Is that right? Well he looked pretty good when I saw him at Sunday Mass.”
And so it would go up to the moment of the unfortunate’s demise. The winner might triumph by recounting a visit to the deceased just minutes ahead of the priest and the hearse.
I came along years too late and was maybe too sheltered to ever witness a legendary Irish ritual that might — or might not —have happened somewhere (the village of Locust Gap was sometimes cited): the 4 a.m. lifting of the dead from the casket for one last toast of the creature, the water of life, Irish Whiskey.
Do I miss those rituals of Irish wakes? Not much.
But be assured I am sorry for your trouble.
Mike Carroll is a Bloomsburg University graduate who practices law in Philadelphia.