My Father’s Wake: How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love and Die by Kevin Toolis, Weidenfeld, £16.99
As a reporter and film-maker, Kevin Toolis “hunted death” for much of his adult life. He knows the “vinegary blood smell” and “bowelly meatiness” that hang in the air of mortuaries. He has visited a Malawian hospital where Aids sufferers, two to a bed, “lay together befouled in their own diarrhoea”. In Gaza, he has looked down on “a bundle of rags buried in grey dust”, the body of a boy called Ayman. He has interviewed fathers of young men killed by the IRA. He has watched a Sudanese mother use her bare hands to dig the grave of her famished baby.
From his own life story, he recounts, in miniature masterpieces of searing candour and intelligence, his boyhood tuberculosis, when, like an innocent child in a fairy story, he “passed unscathed through a dark wood full of monsters”. He also recalls the early loss of his brother, Bernard, to leukaemia – the catalyst for his career roaming the world in continual pursuit of death. Eventually, however, Toolis found that all his searching through “dozens and dozens of destroyed lives” had led him into a “wilderness”, where death had lost all purpose, and so had he.
Then his father, Sonny, developed pancreatic cancer, ending his days as “a starved, skeletal husk”, a sight that “scalded the eye”. Yet Toolis concludes that nothing else he has ever done or will do was more important than the days spent at home in County Mayo, first in vigil around Sonny as his life ground towards its end, and then in waking and burying him, swept slowly along by the ancient rituals surrounding death in rural Ireland.
This was an occasion for “mortal solidarity”, where formulaic condolences allowed everyone to say “out loud together that the world had changed, my father was gone and there was no going back”. The burden of death is “shared out, talked over and tamed”. The rituals – people calling by to take part in the vigil, the open coffin in the family home, the lamentations of grieving women, the quorum of watchful men, even the endless rounds of sandwiches – encourage “unselfish concern for stricken strangers, a reaching out to dress another’s wound”. When it comes to how to die, Kevin Toolis concludes (and I tend to agree): “It will be much easier if we copy what the Irish do already.”
Echoes of these ways are to be found in Homer, a constant reference point for the author, a link between Europe’s last island outpost and one of her most ancient cultures. The book is further enriched by powerful evocations of Mayo’s wild Atlantic shoreline, of the gut-wrenching ruptures of exile and of Sonny’s patient decency. Every page is a cataract of ideas and emotion but, at the same time, Toolis can get to the heart of deep matter in a single phrase. “Death is a whisper in the Anglo-Saxon world” is one such line.
However, this also presages one of the book’s few failings. Toolis lambasts the denial that drives the “Western Death Machine”, where bodies are “taken hostage by the ‘authorities’ to await lawful release and an allotted slot for burning at the local council-run crematorium”. He has a point but, like an irate teenager in fresh possession of a great truth, he finds no room for nuances, exceptions, hidden depths. He even tries to harangue readers into writing down the year they might be expected to die, plying us with helpful statistics.
As for Catholicism, there is a certain amount of irony and distancing from the very first page. On the whitewashed wall above his father’s bed, “a cheap print of a ruddy-faced Jesus Christ, his heart exposed and his arms outstretched, offered eternal salvation to his followers”. Christian religion flits in and out of the remainder of the book. Some references are neutral, others vaguely hostile, but almost all are brief. There is no all-out assault until near the end and a neighbour’s devastating account of being denied a proper burial for her stillborn son by “pompous, frocked, dog-collared men”.
We are left to conclude that the faith of his father unlocks no meaning to the final days of Sonny’s life. It is an irrelevant trick played by a “fallen religious empire”. The implications of Christ’s sufferings, of the prayers said over his father’s body, of the beads entwined in lifeless fingers, never really come up for consideration.
Toolis lingers a little over the singing of In Paradisum as Sonny leaves his house for the last time, but the funeral Mass is dealt with in the space of a single sentence. A final verse of the rosary said in Irish by the graveside is brushed aside too. To his son, the fates of Hector and Patroclus bear far more significance than Sonny’s own religion.
I take my hat off to Kevin Toolis. He is not one to blink or flinch before life and death at their most disturbing, but he is alive to beauty and consolation too. He is ready to bare his soul. And he can write it all down in a way that few of us could hope to match.
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