Kevin Toolis - My Fathers Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love, and Die

In the narrow room the old man lay close to death.

Two days before he had ceased to speak, lapsed into unconsciousness, and the final vigil had begun. The ravages of cancer had eaten into the muscle, leaving a starved skeletal husk. In the bed the body lay awkwardly propped; the skull and limbs crucified at jarring angles. The open eyes were cloudy, their tissues dried; the seized mouth a scabby parched red hole. The heart beat on and the lungs drew breath but it was impossible to tell if he remained aware. Above the mans head, to the right on the whitewashed wall, a cheap print of a ruddy-faced Jesus Christ, his heart exposed and arms outstretched, offered eternal salvation to his followers.

Just after dawn on the longest day, the breathing grew hectic. The skeletal ribcage heaved with irregular breath, the wheezing lungs gasping for oxygen, failing into silence and then, against expectation, rising again. The death rattle had commenced. The bean chaointe pronounced; the moment of death was close. A nine-year-old boy was hurriedly despatched to gather in the last of the mans sons. Boy and son returned to find ten watchers crammed shoulder tight within the spartan room, all staring at the tangle of limbs. A rasping breathing filled the air.

Huh, huh, huh.

In the silence of the watchers huh, huh, huh that panicked drowning sound huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, HUH, HUH, HUH rose to a crescendo then plummeted, free-falling, into an agonising void.

And then began again.

Huh, huh, huh

This death was not veiled but a rite within an Irish clan.

I stared around the room at these watchers: at my nine-year-old nephew San who had come for me; at my heavily pregnant cousin Bernadette; at the seer, my matronly Aunt Tilda who now led us in the wake, the woman of wounds, our midwife of death; at Nora, the elderly neighbour who sold eggs; and at other witnesses to whom I had never spoken. I wondered what they sought to gain from the moment of death of this man. Of Sonny. My father.

The seer broke out in prayer and began to recite the Five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

As one, the watchers returned her chant. The tight single-bedded room, no bigger than a prison cell, filled up; the song of voices overwhelming the stuttering rhythm of Sonnys lungs.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

The sound boomed off the ceiling, off the white-washed walls, the concrete floor, the glass cover of Jesus Our Saviour, reverberating, louder and louder, filling every orifice.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou, amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Verse, after verse, prayer after prayer. Keening.

For years as a child, in one gloomy Catholic church after another, I recited that prayer, running the words together like a hollowed verbal conjuring trick until I could say HolyMaryMotherofGodprayforus sinners now andatthehour ofourdeath in four seconds flat.

Words breathed but emptied of meaning.

Now, I was home on the island off the coast of Irelands poorest county, Mayo, in the furthest western reaches of Europe, for the hour of this death.

Home on an island of elemental fury, a rock citadel in the great ocean, where huge Atlantic storms break onshore, scouring the landscape and destroying everything not anchored down. The wind howling, wailing, car-door-wrenching. At night as you lie in bed awake, the storm surging in assault, striking at the rattling roof, the shaking windows, to suck you out, every living soul within, up into the maelstrom. The great ocean, a hundred yards away, was alive and malevolent, the surf a cascading white fury. The waves lashing every headland, surging, turning, daring you just close enough to capture you for the depths. My godfather, a shepherd, and two of his companions were swept to their deaths rescuing sheep on what had started as a clear winters day.

And with the wind comes the rain. Bucketing, drenching rain, for months on end. Swallowing the ocean, the earth, the hills, the horizon, in a bleary, grey stinging assault. Pouring, pouring, from the sky in deluge. Black mile-high sheets of falling water sweeping in from the western horizon, bursting on the sodden earth before roaring back down heather hillsides into the ocean. The sky too another vast ocean; often grey or darkening black with rain-laden clouds, but sometimes pink, scarlet red or blue. Or shimmering with light as sun-lanced pillars of gold burst through an overcast sky onto grey waters. Or the air filling up with mist showers and the whole world, sea, sky, earth, glimmering back in a mirror of silver light.

And then there are days when the sun blazes as a God chariot rising from behind Minaun mountain over the ocean in a great arc before descending in a blood red orb into the ocean behind Croaghaun mountain. Yellow lilacs rocket skywards from the bog, and meadows sway with golden buttercups and white daisies. The sea turns green glass, the wind stills, and dolphins leap in the surf so close to shore you could easily swim out to them. Like a smoky perfume, the smell of peat turf lazily drifts over the village and the blue-eyed sheepdogs of Dookinella deliciously spread themselves on the tar and gravel road to cool their molten bodies.

As Sonny lay dying we had another kind of weather: humid, hazy days, the entire village consumed in sea mist. We were unable to see further than the garden gate: all land, sea and sky shrouded in a still blanket that made night and day one. We were becalmed. Waiting for his heart to stop, the wake, his funeral, the church, the grave. Waiting for the death of this very ordinary man. Waiting, I thought, to start again. Resume Life. As it turned out, nothing else I have ever done or will do was more important than those precious days.