BRÍD AND DAVID ARE TOMMY’S SURPRISE GUESTS
MCGOWANS DISCUSS LIFE AS FUNERAL DIRECTORS AND BRÍD PERFORMS ON TOMMY TIERNAN TV SHOW
FUNERAL directors David and Bríd McGowan were among the guests on last weekend’s episode of the Tommy Tiernan Show.
The father and daughter duo, the latter of whom is also a harpist who performed later on the show, talked about the embalming process, being trusted with the remains of a grieving family’s loved one, spirituality and his side project of opening a glamping site in Enniscrone.
Tommy Tiernan initially did not recognise his guests – with the premise of the show being that he does not have prior knowledge of who appears each week – and it was the story of bringing a jumbo jet to west Sligo via a barge which set off the light for the host as he quickly realised who his guests were.
“It’s in my back garden. She’s one of the biggest jumbo jets you could actually get. I didn’t go for a small one now. It had to be big, we think big all the time,” David said.
“I thought I’d come up with some idea myself that would attract a social media circle.” “To do that it’d have to be something strange and something big. So we went with turning old types of transportation into accommodation and that didn’t exclude a plane.”
On the subject of looking after the remains of the deceased, Bríd said it is always a great honour for them to be entrusted with a loved one.
“There’s something special with being given the job of looking after someone’s loved one. You don’t just hand them over, there is a lot of trust there which brings a lot of responsibility on us to do things right and treat them with the most dignity. You don’t know their story, but you learn more and more about the person and it is really special.”
Easkey native David has been a funeral director for more than 40 years, but in that time he finds the meaning of embalming is often misconstrued. He explained to viewers what the misconception is and what the process actually involves. “The word ‘embalming’ is a bit of a misnomer. If you look it up you’ll see mummification coming up as an explanation. “There isn’t one person in Ireland who will come into me and say ‘my granny has passed away and I want her mummified’. All they want is for their loved one looked after. It is a hygenic treatment, the technique is similar to a drip.
“It is inserted into the vascular system and that takes two and a half to three hours and it pauses the decomposition process.”
David went on to explain the impact working as a funeral director has had on his spirituality as he discussed his belief of that the spirit of the deceased lingers for as long as it is needed.
“There’s something very spiritual about a deceased person. I believe the spirit is around. I believe the spiritual world is much greater than this one down here,” he said.
“I find it in rooms and I’ve seen things happen at funerals that you just couldn’t say were coincidences. I do believe the spirit is there for a good while after the person passes on. “I think it stays around for as long as it needs to. I do believe it moves on somewhere else, I don’t know where that is, but I do think it’ll wait around and it’ll mind people.”
David went on to tell a story about a home in Sligo he visited recently with the remains a household member who had passed away.
“I went into a house in Sligo town the other day with remains. Usually I’ll go in and set up a coffin in a room. I wouldn’t take the lid off in front of the people. So I said to the son, ‘where would you like the coffin?’ and he said ‘over there along the window’.”
“I went into the room and I said [to the wife] ‘I have himself laid out, he’s all set to go in’,” he continued.
“She only stood at the jam of the door and she let out a scream. She said: ‘Take him out of there. That picture, he hated that picture.’ She went hysterical over it. We got her over to the chair and we were just sitting down and the next thing we heard this almighty bang and in we went.” “The picture fell off the wall. She told me that picture was there 30 years and it never moved and he hated it.”
Bríd also spoke about spirituality and the strong, lingering “feelings” that tend to only present themselves when a young person has passed away in tragic circumstances.
“You get a feeling that is hard to explain. You can sense things from people, with older people you rarely find it, but with a younger person a spirit is more present, particularly when it’s a tragedy because you can nearly feel the pain they are feeling.”
Later in the programme, to conclude the edition of the Tommy Tiernan Show, Bríd returned under her stage name Brídín to perform a rendition of Ocean of Stars, a track from her debut EP of the same name.