We are encouraged to be more open and honest about death these days: to make “living wills” about our own end of life and to be truthful with patients facing a terminal illness.
This month of November is a season of commemoration of the dead – beginning with the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, moving on to the poppy-wearing emblems recalling the war dead. We often see pictures of the Mexican Day of the Dead, a huge national event there.
And yet, when it comes to condolences after a death, bereaved people can still feel hurt by the silence with which a loss is met. A friend of mine who lost her adult daughter in very sad circumstances tells me that in her small town in the south-east of England, neighbours still crossed the road rather than approach her to offer their condolences.
Her own friends and family have been supportive, yet she’s often found herself alone in her home, and no one has called around to offer their time and presence. To his credit, the vicar who conducted the funeral did subsequently telephone to ask how she was coping, though he doesn’t live locally. And so, indeed, a churchman should.
I realise that in England people can feel embarrassed, or not know what to say, or even avoid a bereaved person as a way of respecting their privacy. It isn’t always because they don’t care.
But if social attitudes are becoming more open towards death, then we should be made aware that it’s really important to offer condolence to the bereaved and even to offer companionship in their grief. You only have to say “I’m sorry for your loss”; anything, indeed, rather than avoidance, or silence.
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It sometimes happens that when you’re introduced to a stranger by name, you forget their name two minutes after the introduction. So during such introductions, I occasionally add a mnemonic: “My name is Mary, and maybe 50 per cent of Irishwomen over 50 are called some version of Mary – including Maureen, Miriam, Marian, Maura. So if you address any older Irishwoman as Mary, you have a 50 per cent chance of being right.”
This usually acts as a useful aide-memoire. But the departure from the name of Mary, in its many different forms, is evident from baptismal registers in Irish churches. The Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook, Dublin published a note of recent baptisms in the parish: not a single Mary among them. Names for girls included Faye, Isabelle, Eloise, Harper, Eve, Charlotte, Kyle, Grace, Cara, Alice, Henrietta, Skyla, Florence, Rose, Amelia, Honor, Emma and Chloe.
I’d love to have been called Isabelle or Charlotte as a child, because Mary was so confusingly prevalent. Now, for a new generation, it has a rarity value.
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It occurs to me sometimes that I should make time in my life for a brief retreat – to retire from the world’s clamour and nourish the spirit.
But I feel I have been on a kind of retreat for the past week. I’ve moved abode in Dublin (I live in Kent, but maintain a small flat in Dublin) and for seven days I had no Wi-Fi, no television and no landline phone.
Although I had radio and a mobile phone, I nonetheless felt completely cut off from the world without access to the internet – and the powers that be ensure that you do feel cut off. Every public announcement on radio – say, about the running, or cancellation, of trains and transport – is followed by “visit our website for further details.” Theatre, cinema and even church services are accessed through websites.
I scoffed at the idea that broadband should be regarded as an essential public service, like water or energy – we’ve only had it for a couple of decades or so – but now I see the point.
What would happen to civilisation if some enemy force cut off this network, so taken for granted? We’d be lost.
There are cafés where Wi-Fi is available, so I could lug the laptop to one such during opening hours. But for the most part I felt positively monastic without this service being on tap.
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