Before and after
“A wake is gathering of family and friends, held around the open coffin before the funeral or cremation, to keep watch and honour the dead.”
The English are a bit weird about death, as we know. But then again, they might say the same about us. And when I described the Irish wake to a friend in Transylvania – a place I thought would be on our side of this cultural divide – recently, just the bit about the open coffin made her shudder.us, after all. In any case, the English way of doing things is the small, private family funeral with coffin closed early, followed at some point by a public commemoration.
A good wake can be almost exhilarating, although there may be a downside to that too, postponing the bit where you have to grieve. When my mother died in 2011, we had a 48-hour festival of tea and sandwich-making . A wake officially ends, I suppose, when the coffin is closed. It certainly doesn’t extend to events in the pub or restaurant afterwards, whatever reporters at Michael Parkinson’s funeral thought.
This was the subject of an article in Britain’s Folklore magazine a few years ago, itself based on oral research from the 1960s, which recorded memories of it happening in most Ulster counties.
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