Hardwired for hard times, we will adapt and prevail
Ireland must plunge on through the thickets of doubt and remember these three wise but simple words: life goes on
EVERYTHING we know feels shaken loose, and uncertainty shudders through life and death. Funerals, it is generally agreed, are one of the things Ireland does well.
The country may have been found hapless and inefficient in other ways, but in the elemental matter of burying our dead, we rely on traditions worn deep into rhythm and ritual over hundreds of years.
But the remorseless path cut by Covid19 is not halted at the altar of a church, or by the open casket in a funeral home.
The black ribbon affixed to the door of a house in mourning may be a potent symbol of loss, but it is powerless against this bewildering new threat.
Last week, the following advice was issued by the Irish Association of Funeral Directors to its members: ‘There should be no provision for condolence book and pen at the funeral and public reposing must be discouraged as should funeral home gatherings.
‘Family gatherings should be by inviteonly and attendance restricted to below 100. Social distancing must be maintained, with no handshaking or hugging.’
This is of a piece with the messages repeated over and over as citizens are mobilised to check the course of this voracious illness.
It is nonetheless an astonishing circumstance. The same organisation caused controversy when it advised two weeks ago that funerals of those who died as a result of this virus should be postponed, and the deceased should, instead, be brought directly to a cemetery or crematorium.
This was condemned as drastic and unfeeling, and the measures were later tempered.
The ones now governing all funerals remain severely restrictive, and are indicative of how much life has been forced to change, and how those changes will reshape precious traditions after the worst of the current restrictions are ended.
Death and how we try and make sense of it will be a part of that tentative hope we have for the future: the new normal.
Footage provided by RTÉ journalist Seán Mac an tSíthigh from Ballyferriter resonated far beyond that beautiful part of west Kerry last week.
IT showed the funeral of a local woman wending through the village on its way to the graveyard for a burial from which all but those closest to the deceased were excluded. On both sides of the road, her friends and neighbours stood two metres apart, remote witnesses to an event that would usually consume everyone in a small Irish village or town.
The woman who died was called Betty Ryan, and her story was picked up by The New York Times.
‘That was beautiful what they did,’ Betty Ryan’s daughter Carol told the newspaper. ‘And it was for Mom. It was because of who she was.’
The thoughtfulness and decency of a small community on the edge of the Atlantic had an international resonance – but it was also vital in the message it contained for the people of Ireland.
Death matters here, just as life does, and death has always been treated in a way that acknowledges the deceased but also comforts their family and those in mourning.
The funeral of Betty Ryan was illustrative of a community insisting that life still be honoured, and that death is an event that no one person or family need meet on their own.
It was a precious reminder, at a time when fear and anxiety lurk in many shuttered parts of the country, that we remain part of a bigger story.
No-one should be forgotten. No life should pass unmarked.
Assumptions about how we live and die are facing constant challenge, and there is no sign of that changing soon.
There is nothing for it, then, but to plunge on through the thickets of doubt.
The poet Robert Frost once remarked that ‘in three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on’.
Depending on how that sentence is tilted towards the light, it can be read as deadening pessimism, or tribute to a human spirit that will not be contained.
There is a rich trove of evidence from our experience encouraging the second meaning.
Struggle has been central to the
Irish condition for centuries. Much of it was imposed, some of it was homemade, but it has always been borne, and endured, and eventually shed. Recent years have seen the State acknowledging – not always in a sure-footed manner – the events that led to the emergence of an independent Ireland.
They provide concentrated proof of the aptitude for rebounding, even from a trauma as cruel and intimate as a civil war.
The after-effects erupted violently in Northern Ireland, and for all the pain and death and mindless malevolence they inflicted on that society and on ours, too, peace eventually found a way.
Economic incompetence has been a repeated cause of collective suffering – but also a recurring obstacle successfully cleared.
The 1980s was a decade when Ireland’s premium export was its young people, when a little hope was lost to America on each plane leaving the airports at Dublin and Shannon.
The departed made new lives for themselves, but maintained links to what they once knew in any way they could.
The recent surge of émigré doctors and nurses returning home to provide their expertise on the front-line of this relentless battle with the coronavirus shows that though our nation’s progeny may be forging careers and lives abroad, the connection to home, and its people, is extant and profound.
The GAA was a vital connection to home – and a reminder of why the resumption of sport will be a critical point in tracking recovery from the coronavirus.
Sport can seem a trifling thing, but its importance in offering hope should not be lightly regarded.
There is a story told, and it might be apocryphal, about a flight leaving O’Hare Airport in Chicago one mid-week September day in 2012.
Its departure was delayed by several hours, but nobody on board cared. The passenger list comprised almost entirely emigrants from Donegal and Mayo, and they were returning to Ireland for an AllIreland football final between the counties the following Sunday.
Many of them had left here as teenagers, their country unable to provide them with the chance to start lives of their own.
So they left, and they found a way.
Then a new generation emerged here after the trials of mass emigration, and for a time thrived in a country that seemed modern and vital.
In the past decade, the place was ruined again, and just as recent
years brought proud talk of recovery and then robust growth, a thick new darkness has descended.
The Economic and Social Research Institute talks of the economy contracting by over 7% between now and the end of the year.
Jobless figures are currently catastrophic, and in the longer term, when industry resumes and employment returns for many, the numbers are expected to remain shockingly high.
Difficulties abound. Solace, meagre as it might seem this morning, can be sourced in the irreducible fact that Ireland has suffered before and it has insisted on recovering.
There is the consolation, too, in knowing that the country has dealt with the horrendous effects of a public health crisis in living memory.
Tuberculosis killed tens of thousands decade after decade, from the end of the 19th century until well into the second part of the 20th.
Death was not its only sting. Social isolation was part of the treatment but also a consequence of its deadly reputation. The stigma around TB was so powerful that it went by other names, most commonly consumption.
SEAMUS Heaney, in an essay he once wrote in History Ireland called The Sense Of The Past, invoked an example from within his own family.
‘I knew more from overhearing and piecing together than from being told directly that a number of my father’s family had died in their teens and twenties from “the decline”, as tuberculosis was known in those days,’ he wrote.
‘Names of vanished uncles and aunts floated through the conversation. Johnny and Jamie and Maggie and Agnes.’
There are other historical accounts, too, of children dying in sanatoria, and even while they struggled in their last hours and days, the funeral clothes in which they would be dressed were placed in wait at the bottom of their beds.
Its resonance in modern life means that it is for the Mother and Child Scheme, and the controversies attending it, that Dr Noël Browne is now best remembered.
His enormous role in the battle against TB should, though, never be forgotten, and is given a fresh perspective as the State struggles with a wretched new enemy.
The rest of the world is joined in that battle, too, and there will not be a country on the Earth that is not changed in a significant way by it.
Ireland this morning is quiet and seems cowed. Streets that should be clogged with shoppers and idlers and tourists are barren.
Lights remain off and business owners are sick with worry as they contemplate what comes next.
For now, there is no next; there is only now. And now requires patience, diligence and hope that the crisis will sometime relent.
And it will, because they always do. And we can say that, because we know it to be true.
Adversity has swamped these shores before. When it recedes, what will remain is a people who understand Frost’s simple, overwhelming truth about life.
It goes on.