. . .feel
the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.
You were born fit for it.
Stand in here in front of me
and take the strain.

From A Kite for Michael and Christopher by Seamus Heaney

My mother tells me she and my dad were able to attend Palm Sunday services on Sunday,virtually, on the iPad I gave her a few years ago. It took a wee while to get the hang of it, she says, but it was lovely, the Minister and his wife reaching the faithful with Bible readings and music from an empty village church, one of thousands of empty churches across the island of Ireland as Holy Week, the highpoint of the Christian calendar unfolds. In this time of Coronavirus, my mother’s iPad, dismissed once upon a time by my father as an unnecessary new fangled contraption that he would never use, is now a cherished lifeline for my parents, unwitting poster-children of physical distancing and social connecting.

The full impact of church closures in Ireland struck me last week, when I read on Facebook about the untimely death of a woman I remember as a laughing girl playing hopscotch around the corner. In the middle of the online Funeral Notice of her death, under the heading Funeral and Wake Arrangements, sat a sentence in its own paragraph, a sentence copied and pasted in every subsequent notice:

In keeping with Government Regulations at this time, the wake, funeral and burial will be strictly private and for family members only.

Strictly private.

Such a request – strictly private – used to be a choice for grieving families. To be fair, it was also a choice that was sometimes ignored, the custom of visiting the wake or the house over two days so deeply ingrained in our culture, especially in rural communities. As this pandemic tightens its grip, it is no longer a choice nor can it be ignored. Public worship, private prayer, and all other meetings and activities except for vital community services are cancelled, with “strictly private” among the new protocols for funerals issued by the HSE to the Irish Association of Funeral Directors. For the foreseeable future, there will be no traditional funerals and wakes, no slow and sombre procession behind a hearse down country lanes, no turn-taking with the ‘lifting.’ Everywhere the Coronavirus has struck, regardless of religion, north or south of the border, there are new rites for closeness and closure. The traditions that have for so long allowed us to pay our respects in known ways have been abandoned. Those known ways in Ireland, I once read, were the right ways.

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“It’s definitely an Irish thing,” a friend of mine once surmised, musing that the way we deal with dying and death is stitched tidily in our DNA. She may have a point. While no one explicitly taught us these rituals, we have learned by heart to mark time, stop the clocks, cover mirrors, and close the curtains. We do not falter when led silently into a darkened bedroom where the deceased has been ‘laid out’ in an open coffin. We know how to express condolences over strong tea in china cups balanced on saucers bearing digestive biscuits. We know when to shake hands and say like a catechism the thing that only we say, “I’m sorry for your trouble.” We know when to whisper, when to weep, and when to throw our heads back in laughter over a bit of craic about a life lived in full. We know the songs to sing. We are the people in the Seamus Heaney poems. We know our place. Denied it, we are lost.

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My first remembered experience of an Irish funeral was when my grandfather died in 1977. Scores of men in dark suits came out to pay their respects and to say goodbye to Granda. I wasn’t allowed to go – in those days in rural County Derry, women and girls did not attend funerals. Only the men representing the neighboring townlands of Broagh, Lemnaroy, and Drumlamph, participated in the walking cortège along the Hillhead road. Warm in the sunshine that splashed intermittently through woody rhododendrons and alder trees, walked sons and brothers, grandsons, nephews, distant male relatives, and neighboring farmers, some of them, including my father, taking turns with “the lifting” of the coffin. Denied the opportunity to walk with the men who filled the road my grandfather had revealed to me on our walks, I hid most of the day. My road, I knew where the foxgloves and bluebells hid, where the travelers camped their ponies and colorful caravans, where to find big, broad docken leaves that would instantly soothe the sting of a nettle, and where Granda would stop for a minute to retrieve a Barley Sugar from his pocket.

While the men were at the funeral, the women stayed behind and stayed busy, making sandwiches that were neatly cut into little triangles and placed with shortbread and buns on three-tiered china cake stands. After the burial, the men returned to the house followed by a steady stream of mourners, to pay their respects over cups of tea or perhaps “a half-un” of whiskey. After my grandfather’s funeral, the men returned, my mother reminds me not for a cup of tea in your hand, in the parlance, but instead to sit down at a tea-table, on which a white linen tablecloth bore plates of salad, meats, chutneys, and homemade damson plum jam to spread on just baked wheaten bread. And, after them, well into the wee hours, callers came and went with hugs and home-baked Victoria sponges and songs and stoic handshakes punctuated with that simple salve – “sorry for your trouble” that conjures Big Jim Evans and the old men in Heaney’s Mid-Term Break – parochial, intimate, and for the foreseeable future, taboo.

Today, the Irish Hospice Foundation launched a Care and Inform online hub to provide accurate information around funerals and grieving during the Covid-19 crisis. It includes new ways, new norms to replace the traditions that have carried us for hundreds of years, and the Irish must and will find new ways and words to rise to the occasion, to show the kind of sympathy and solidarity that is needed now more than before. At one funeral service, the congregation was made up of floral tributes on each seat with families attending via Zoom or Google Hangouts. A photograph circulating on Twitter shows neighbors lining the road to the graveyard, silent sentinels maintaining social distancing as they bid a poignant and final farewell.

In the weeks to come, the Irish will continue to discover different ways to reach out to the dying, the dead, and the bereaved. There will be new rituals for burial and bereavement – virtual and surreal as this very time – to connect the living and the dead. When it comes to grieving, Heaney once wrote, we are born ‘fit for it’ – we are well suited to ‘take the strain.’

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