Good grief and blithe spirits — drinking and celebrating while mourning

The Irish have gifted the world many cultural exports, but none more effective than the wake for dealing with death and grief.

The Irish wake is embedded in the culture of that country. It’s an essential step in the mourning process meant to encourage tears, laughter, music and celebration, perhaps even rebellion.

The Irish know pain and suffering, colonisation, poverty and famine. Life and death, they know, both have their advantages.

A social media flare-up this week about the serving of alcohol at local graveyards elicited a flurry of calls from across the country to the public broadcaster.

From Mpumalanga to Mdantsane, listeners to host Cathy Mohlahlana on SAfm weighed in, with many older callers condemning the “habit” while younger listeners asked: What’s the big deal?

“We celebrate because the person is free from their troubles,” said one young man from Gauteng.

South Africans, too, know pain and suffering.

We learnt that each day, on weekdays and over weekends, serial funeral attendees hang around the country’s graveyards, dressed to blend in with the mourners. These are professional mourners who get through life in the slipstream of the dead and those who are left behind.

The accompanying accoutrements, the booze, the food and the continuing party are where the moral self replenishes while the alcohol helps to release the spirit. So they say.

Each to their own

Grumbling from most of the older callers was about “social ills”, alcohol abuse – an undeniably serious problem in South Africa – and general disrespect.

The youth, said the pastors, should Bible-up and walk the path. Others complained that these new “practices” were not part of the country’s cultural fabric and were leading us on the road to ruin.

Linguist Gugu Mkhize, a lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, offered the most pragmatic response, informing TimesLIVE that “what’s happening is not cultural, but I cannot say it’s wrong because people have their own reasons for doing this”.

An Irish company offering urns after cremation – a huge existential issue for Catholics, who were forbidden to cremate their dead until 1963 – explains that the wake “can be both heartrendingly mournful and joyously commemorative, sometimes simultaneously”. It is not only for mourning, but to celebrate and honour the “gift of life”.

“This is why alcohol and music, both significant staples of Irish culture, are often heavily featured at a wake,” the company says.

There are those who choose to do their mourning and suffering in silence, comforted by religious texts, chants and other rituals. Reverence for the dead, ancestors and the cycle of life is just another portal to our common fate – death.

Death be not bland

In fact, let it be said, South African funerals are the best. A few years ago a very dear friend died unexpectedly in Australia. The country led to her shortened life for various reasons.

Leaving your country of birth for one where you might encounter a possum in your garage or a koala in your kitchen can be unsettling.

These things just don’t compute with the South African brain unless you have lived in Australia for a very long time. My friend took time to adjust, and she never quite felt at home.

Her funeral was to be streamed on the Web, and the morning of the event I logged on early to watch a few of the funerals that were to take place before hers.

It was a parade of uniform, conveyor-belt efficiency. Each coffin was allowed only about 50 minutes on the podium in the “church” before the next was carried in. The same flowers remained. Each family was given a few moments to set up their own photographs.

Read more: The language of grief – what to say when someone dies

Identical funerals for identical people. All of them appear to have spent most of their lives in nature, fishing or on holiday or in Sydney near the Opera House. All of them deeply happy.

All died of “natural causes”, it seemed, which was refreshing from a South African perspective.

But how I longed for a traditional rural funeral with heartfelt sobbing and unmasked sorrow, maybe even fainting. How I longed for an open casket and the last, long goodbye.

When you live hard, you die hard and often you have to grieve hard. Whatever makes your spirit blither… do it. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.