Seán Moncrieff: Funeral sandwiches are part of the Irish grieving process

Myself and Herself started talking about funerals, mostly because we were about to go to one. When a death occurs and it’s someone you don’t know that well (in this instance, the parent of someone who we are enormously fond of), there’s a standard set of questions: the circumstances of the death, how family members are coping, and, of course, the location and time of the funeral itself.

And it was this final detail that revealed a mammoth gap in our relative experiences of Irish funeral traditions – one so wide that we were both mildly appalled that we hadn’t known this about each other.

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I had asked her about the funeral mass and idly speculated about where we would probably go for the tea and sandwiches afterwards, to which she responded: “No. It’ll be a meal.” There then followed an almost-row in which Herself maintained that she’s never been to funeral where there wasn’t a sit-down dinner, sometimes with wine. I’ve never been to a funeral where there wasn’t tea and sandwiches. I’ve never even heard of anyone putting on such lavish catering – that’s wedding-level expense.

There then followed an accounting of how many funerals each of us had been to, the idea being that the one with the greater number could claim a higher level of expertise in this matter, which, obviously, was rather silly and left us both feeling slightly irked. Counting back through how much death you’ve witnessed is never a jolly experience.

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It might seem trivial to be exercised about what you eat at a funeral, yet for both of us, there was an emotional connection to it. At all the funerals I’ve been to – and especially those of people I loved – there was a comfort in the ordinariness of the process. It’s not a time when you want any surprises or innovations. You want to be able to give yourself up to a well-established process. The lying in repose, the funeral mass, the burial. And afterwards, repairing to a mid-range hotel for tea, sandwiches and soup.

The emotional temperature at these events is distinctly different from anything else in daily life. There’s a profound sense of care and permissiveness because there’s no prescribed way to conduct yourself. People can laugh or cry, make inane small talk or wax philosophical. They can speak about the deceased person or not mention them at all.

Women often say that the tea and toast they are given after childbirth is the most delicious they have ever had. And the tea and sandwiches at a funeral, for me anyway, are analogous to that. It’s not that they are particularly excellent. Irish funeral sandwiches are largely the same – chicken, ham and cheese, something fishy – so much so that you could classify them as a particular branch of Irish cuisine (Daughter Number Four regards crisp sandwiches as “Irish food”. She’s not wrong).

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It’s more a reminder of when you ate similar sandwiches in similar circumstances and how you felt at the time. It’s evocative and, somehow, part of the grieving process, along with the funeral itself, the month’s mind and the yearly mass at which people are remembered.

Grief cycles down in intensity over time but it never completely goes away. It pops up when you expect it – at other funerals – and also when you don’t. You can be caught by a smell, a phrase or a piece of music that brings everything tumbling back. It often happens to me when I glance in the mirror and see my father’s face, staring back at me. Which isn’t so bad. He was a handsome man.

As it turned out, there were tea and sandwiches at this funeral, which gave me that small, familiar ache. But, not uncommonly, there was to be a second mass in Cork where, Herself told me, the attendees would get a sit-down meal. So we were both right.