My fathers wake, p.2
My Father's Wake, page 2
Fresh waters, too, flow down from the hills into the ocean, dribbling out through the embankment of stones forming mini canyons in the sands of the strand before every snaking channel is obliterated again by the incoming tide.
The sands themselves flow west, then east. Out and in. Draining away into the ocean to expose the violent tilted bedrock of the earth. And then surging back, covering over nature’s tumult, replenishing the strand again in no discernible pattern. Erosional tides suck sand and stone out to sea. Depositional tides recycle sands and stone back to shore. The shoreline never breaks.
Down on the beach you are most often alone; just you, the far horizon and the twin oceans of sky and sea. The wind sings in the air. Whipping sand strings flare out across the flat expanse and the solitary track of your feet runs back as if into infinity. It is hard not to feel small in the force of this place. Or even remember the worries of the city life you left behind.
Dookinella is a dangerous edge of the world. The power of the scourging tide is rewritten in ever-changing stone patterns on the rampart embankment twice daily. Offshore, there is a strong rip current that deters most swimmers and surfers. Beyond the rip there is America, 3,000 miles away. The water is cold and the green Atlantic breakers, unimpeded from the deep ocean, can easily knock you off your feet. Wave after wave engulfs you as the rip tide sucks hard at the sand beneath your feet. At first everything in the water is uncertain, scary: the dangers too wild. But if you hold your place, steel yourself in the moment, the fear lessens; the glistening waters lose their threat, and you can plunge headlong, surfing into the waves, whooping in delight, embracing the elements.
Sonny never lost his wonder for the ocean, going shoring and hunting the high-water mark for the flotsam and jetsam of the tide. Along its mark, strange treasures are scattered, bleached out in the light like relics: fluorescent orange fisherman’s gloves, unscathed glass bottles, lost quill pen seagull feathers, skeins of fishing nets, lone running shoes, battered fishing crates, floats, clear plastic water bottles, suntan lotion sprays bearing Cyrillic script dumped overboard by distant ships, the odd eye-pecked body of a dead sheep, a porpoise or a seal, cast-off rope and driftwood timber.
Different seasons bring different harvests. In high summer, blooms of purple moon jellyfish and their stinging compass jellyfish cousins are carried to shore. Thousands of translucent floating blue sailors, small hydrozoans that drift on the ocean surface, lie marooned at low tide. Turbulent spring tides deposit forests of ocean-ripped brown kelp. Autumnal mysteries, colonies of percebes–gooseneck barnacles, a rare delicacy that sells for hundreds of pounds a kilo in the city–arrive on encrusted wooden logs. With every high tide the ocean adds or subtracts from its jetsam until a big storm hits; the waves swallow everything, and the beach is stripped back to stone.
The tide’s driftwood–storm-tossed, wind-wracked, salt-scorched–is fantastically shaped; burnished mahogany, dark pine, silvery bark-stripped logs and dismembered wooden chests. Often, the tidal haul is part of some former thing; embedded with nails and bolts that drove the wreckage’s original purpose. The ocean delivers nature’s cast-offs too; tree trunks, clumps of dried cliff heather and limbs of ancient bog wood somehow washed to sea. If the driftwood has been in the water for any length of time it will be hollowed out, eaten through by the fearsome Teredo navalis, the naval worm that burrows its way into wooden hull sailing ships.
When the wind blows onshore there is often enough wood for a whole day’s fire. Sonny would gather the wood, wrapping bundles in scraps of fishing nets and dragging it home to let it dry out on the grate. Some pieces, set up on either side of the fire, seemed too beautiful to burn. But wood, sea and time are a destructive combination; the ocean’s salt leaches out the wood’s natural protective oils. As the timber dries, it loses the ocean’s sheening lustre and turns dull grey. In the fire, the driftwood burns with a crackling, spurting fury until everything is consumed; the ash in the morning is fine. All that remains are twisted iron nails–the last link to a lost purpose.
A few days before this final gathering, Sonny had risen from his deathbed for his last sight of the great ocean. Teresa drove him down to the end of the road, to the base of Minaun and the perpetual stream of Abhainn Mór, where in dry summers he had gathered water as a child and carried it in buckets back three quarters of a mile to the village. Someone took a picture of them there. Sonny, gaunt and frail, can barely stand and is leaning against the side of the car for support. He is smiling. My sister is smiling, too, triumphant that this journey proved possible.
Down on shore on that milky morning, I knew Sonny would never return. His next journey would be in a coffin to the graveyard on a nearby mountain, hidden in the mist, where all our ancestors lay buried. On the beach the tide was out and I slowly descended down the rampart of stones into the enclosing mist. On the strand, within a few steps, I was fogged in, directionless. Blinded. I felt as if I was submerged; the only sound the whispers of far off waves. At the ocean’s edge, thin skeins of water lapped the sand, leaving a trail of bubbles behind that floated and then burst. The tide was waning, draining away into the limitless ocean, mixing salt and fresh with the waters of the mountain running out on the beach. The flowing mountain waters had carved out their own small seas in the deep sand, some of which had become cut off from the receding tide. In the mist it was easy to lose your footing and plunge knee-deep, sinking into quicksand, a chilly incoming wave surging around your legs. Unsure of the danger, my trousers sodden to the thigh, I turned back from the water’s edge to rejoin the living, the dying and my father’s wake.
WHISPERS
Death is a whisper in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, lower our voices and draw the screens. We want to give the dead, the dying, the grieving, room. We say we do so because we don’t want to intrude. And that is true.
What could we say anyway?
Hi, how do you feel about soon being dead?
Supposing no one has told them they are dying? Or they don’t want to know?
Whatever you do don’t even mention the word ‘cancer’.
Or ‘dying’.
You would only upset them. Who wants to talk about their own death? Who wants to talk about death at all?
But what else could you possibly talk about?
The weather?
Their holidays? Football? What?
It would all be too awkward. What can you even say to the bereaved?
Did she say anything at the end?
What was it like in the hospital room when he… passed?
Did you see her?
Was there a smell?
Morbid.
Uncomfortable.
For everyone.
Embarrassing. People would think you were weird.
Of course, it is not just the pain and anguish of others that deters us. We don’t want to see the sick, smell the decay of wizened flesh, feel the coldness of the corpse, or hear the cry of keening women. We don’t want to intrude on the dying because we don’t want to look at the mirror of our own death.
Why have we lost our way with death?
How can it be possible to never talk out loud about death in a world where everyone dies?
There is no great secret that must continue to be closely held for fear of its disclosure. No revelation to be unveiled. No accident nor tragedy, no futile contest nor wrong, not played out a hundred thousand times before; at sea, in foreign fields, a hospital ward, in a street, in war, on a toilet, by cancer, at the gates of Troy, in victory or defeat, in madness or massacre, with or without purpose, amidst your tomatoes, by heart attack, after a long and painful illness, suddenly by your own hand, in the company of strangers, or at home alone in your own bed. Lovers lost, husbands gone, comrades killed, beloved children untimely ripped or aged parent laid to rest.
Death is terrifyingly ordinary. It happens to everyone, everywhere, sometime. Worse of all there are no medical deferments out of it, no credit default swaps, no underhand bargains to be struck. There are no ‘disruptive’ mortality apps. If you breathe, you die.
And there’s nothing new to say or write about death–not since the ancient Greeks and Homer’s Iliad–except that, for the last two centuries, Western society has slowly striven and largely succeeded in removing the dead and dying from public sight. We have pulled the curtains across, privatised our mortality and turned death into a whisper.
Officially, the deceased have become obscene. In the United Kingdom it is a criminal offence to outrage public decency by exposing a corpse near a public highway. In the United States, embalming the dead is deemed a public health necessity. The path to the grave is therefore determined by a professional ‘death industry’ who hold Las Vegas conventions and date their ‘mortality co-workers’ on subterranean internet sites. Death in the West is a closed door on a closed room in a closed world.
If we are asked, most of us say we would like to die at home surrounded by those we love. Statistics show the reverse; the majority of us will end our lives on a general hospital ward strapped into various machines, sedated down to delirium, being industrially shuffled off by what has become our Western Death Machine. Corralling the sick away from public view and discreetly disposing of their bodies is the unvoiced mission of every Western hospital. Whether in a private room or on a crowded ward behind hastily drawn bed curtains, death is sequestered, redefined as medical failure and a shameful public embarrassment.
We have come to believe that this medical undertaking is our natural order. That the old and the sick will die happier amidst the babbling noise and alien light of a hospital ward. That the indignities inflicted upon them are necessary because a ‘home death’–all those fluids, faeces, corruption–is too overwhelming. And that being packed off in the ambulance to die amongst strangers–whoever happens to be on that night’s hospital shift–is what the dying deserve, because this is how life now ends, for all of us.
Like magic, our Western Death Machine can make the dead disappear. Once they stop breathing, the newly deceased slip away sight unseen into a nether world of cunningly disguised solid-sided trolleys, forbidding mortuaries and closed coffins. Most families never see their dead because, as we all know, or have at least been told by someone, somewhere, even if we can’t exactly remember when, that the minute someone dies their rotting body is so full of horrible diseases like Ebola and their corpse would kill you just by touching them.
Or maybe you could catch something, your own death, just by being in the same room?
Why would you want to look anyway?
We console ourselves with morally crippling clichés.
Isn’t it best to remember them as they really were?
Instead of the waxwork off the set of Psycho we are sure, sight unseen, they have instantly become. But unless we do see our dead how will we ever truly know?
If your father, mother or lover were not incarnate in flesh and blood, with an average daily temperature of 37° Celsius, in the same flesh that now lies cold and flaccid on the mortuary slab, who was this other bodiless ‘them’ thing that you are remembering instead? The ‘them’ you never met?
Your mother might cease to be but her physical body never ceases to be the dead her. And if you loved your mother in life then surely it is only natural that you would love and respect her body in death, and see and touch her flesh?
In the Western Death Machine, those who view their dead–like voyagers to strange unknown lands–are said to be exceptional. Brave. Most adult Westerners have never seen or touched a human corpse.
Have you?
One?
Two?
Count off the real dead bodies you have seen on your fingers?
If the dead and the sun are life’s constants, how can the sight of the deceased be so rare you can count the cadavers you’ve seen on one hand?
Wouldn’t you, we, just be horrified if No. 22, up the road, in defiance of the proper regulations, took their dead mother home from the hospital, laid her out on show in the front room for a few days and invited all the neighbours, and their kids, round to have a look? What if they served tea and sandwiches?
What about the public hygiene? Surely there must be some sort of rule against that sort of thing?
And how ridiculous would it be if the men from Nos 28, 32, 36 and 44 said they would feel privileged to dig your mother’s grave by hand themselves, and wouldn’t take any money? Or just enough for a few pints each at the Crossroads Inn?
What would you think if every uncle or brother you had, every male in your family, and failing that even the old men in your mother’s golf club, came round en masse and said it was their duty and fervent wish to carry your mother’s coffin on their shoulders to the grave? Out of respect for their mortal sister. And that it would be one of life’s greatest honours if you allowed them to so do so?
Or if the whole neighbourhood, your colleagues from work, plus a few more strangers who you’ve never met, insisted on coming to her funeral? Uninvited. Just showed up. If they further insisted, each and every one of them, of lining up to shake your hand at the open grave. And what if they then said the same dull cliché over and over again–about how sad they felt about her death? And if for the next few months other people who knew you, and sometimes strangers who didn’t, kept on accosting you? In the supermarket, the office, the bar, to say they too were sorry about the loss of your mother?
Would those repeated public expressions of concern–of grief and mourning–be the most terrible thing in the world?
Death in the West comes to us as news from a foreign land. A country only the intrepid visit. It is a happening elsewhere, over the horizon, like the distant wars, airplane accidents, mass shootings by masked madmen–earthquakes and disasters that fill the evening news. Or sometimes, in the shock of the fall of the great: an assassination of a politician; another drug-drowned film star or a random massacre. Even then we flinch. The dead, indifferent to further harm or shame, can never be openly shown. They must be covered over with tablecloths, body bagged or pixelated out. We protect ourselves on the grounds of public decency, lest sight of mortal flesh disturb our innocence, or puncture our deathless world. We have a taboo about saying the D word out loud. So we dissemble with a hundred and more euphemisms about ‘passing’, substituting transitive verbs for the noun, dead, and the intransigent state of deadness.
We censor our children from the knowledge that one day Mr Death, our Mortal Bogeyman, is going to get them. Who would ever take a child to a funeral? Or dream of letting them touch a corpse? The thought alone is sick. Even in all the fake mayhem and killing in the movies we find it hard to say the ‘D’ word. Hollywood heroes never die on board alien spacecraft–they just don’t make it back. Fictitious corpses are always shrouded, even though it is just actors pretending to be dead. There are complicated Movie Land rules about the colours and precise quantities of fake blood, red or blue, shown on screen–lest death appears too vivid, too real.
We blank death out in the Western Death Machine. Walk into any newsagent and scan the rows of glossy magazines, fashion, biographies of the thin personalities of so-called celebrities, hardwares, softwares, music, movies and hobbies. You’d think in all this selling of seeming newness and eager capitalism there might be space for a few constant titles: Your Coming Death! or Death Rites Revisited. Why isn’t there a FixUpYour Funeral.com comparative website for squeezing the best deal on caskets, grave locations, cremations and the catering? Or a UberHearse app to get the best rates to the nearest graveyard? How about a YourDeathDay app on your smartphone to chart your heartrate and fitness regime alongside your likely actuarial run? A wrist-worn countdown clock, calibrated with your birth year, daily aerobic exercise rate, calorific intake and linked with your genetic inheritance in terms of the death ages of your grandparents and parents, and annual income, to see if you are pushing your projected death date closer or further along?
Strangely, there’s no place in our mortal market for a death guide.
School boards tediously agonise over sex education–what age, where and when, penises and vaginas, AIDS and STDs, sexual etiquette–but as far as I know not one of them ever sets down a curriculum hour of mortality studies.
Why not?
Reading these sentences or talking about dying is not going to kill you, and death is so utterly predictable it’s easy to do the existential arithmetic. Given current Western life expectancies, most of us, statistically at least, will die in our early eighties.
Take your birth year, add eighty, and do the sums.
1940 + 80 = 2020
1951 + 80 = 2031
1962 + 80 = 2042
1973 + 80 = 2053
1984 + 80 = 2064
1995 + 80 = 2075.
And so on.
Get out a pencil and write your projected expiry date down here on the page.
If you don’t have a pencil handy you could always use a pen?
Your personal death date. The end point for You.
Have you ever known the date before?
Isn’t it strange that we don’t ever want to work out what being mortal means?
Or ask the question?
And these few sentences, in this book, might be the first time in your whole life you have ever written down your actuarial death date? Or thought about it? Does the date seem chilling? Even on paper? Like those French gravestones where the name and birth year, but not the death year, of the future occupant is already economically chiselled on the awaiting tomb.
