David McGowan grew up in the Sligo village of Easkey on the Atlantic coast, at a time when most people didn’t own cars or have phones. The “meitheal” – a custom whereby neighbours come together to assist each other with big jobs – was still practised widely, especially around death. McGowan recalls how people would drop everything to support the bereaved, cleaning and tidying their homes and providing food and drink for the wake, while others washed and readied their deceased.
Evoking ancestral traditions that have come down through the millennia, McGowan describes in beautiful detail the community rituals, rites and customs around death which so impressed him in his youth. By his teens, he was working at funerals. Already he had a talent for comforting the bereaved, and an unusual ease with handling the deceased, with whom he often sensed a deep “spiritual connection”.
McGowan describes a momentous day when an embalmer was called from Belfast to attend to a leaking, malodorous coffin reposing in a church. In advance of the funeral, the deceased was rapidly decomposing. This aspect of death, hard to predict or to handle, caused great added suffering to the bereaved. It was a big risk and worry still in the 1970s and 1980s, because embalming – which slows down the decomposition process – was still barely known about in Ireland.
When McGowan understood how embalming dramatically increases dignity, respect and comfort for the bereaved and the “spirits of the deceased”, he moved to Chicago to learn mortuary science. He returned to open his own funeral home in Ballina in 1990, one of the first in rural Ireland. His influence revolutionised death care in this country.
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Reading this memoir, I was occasionally confused about which decade we were in, and an overuse of exclamation marks was distracting. But these are minor criticisms of what is a profoundly compassionate, educational reflection on death, and the rites we’ve developed to help us say goodbye and to support us in our grief.
McGowan’s wise elder words, so conversational in style, are like finding yourself in a cosy pub by the fire with an extraordinary community ritual leader, and getting the chance to talk to him for hours, about what only he knows.
Adrienne Murphy is a freelance critic
