The Wake

 

Imagine, as Irish journalist Kevin Toolis put it, inviting all your neighbours to your home, only to reveal Grandma’s dead body lying on the kitchen table. Imagine, in our culture, offering everyone whiskey and sandwiches while everyone sat around the body and chatted. Imagine hundreds of people coming by, not just to sit in uncomfortable silence around the corpse but to tell stories, to laugh about good times past, to sob in each other’s arms. Imagine an entire party where people flirted and fought and played games around the body. Or carrying the body for miles to the graveyard by hand, or digging the grave yourself. 

 

Most people today, of course, would call the police; exposing a body near a public road is illegal in the UK, Toolis points out, and accident victims are shrouded or pixelated. Many of us go years or decades without ever seeing a body, and never one that has not been embalmed and covered in cosmetics to feign life.

 

Yet in traditional Ireland people laid out their loved ones just like this – and a few still do. Virtually every traditional culture has some similar ritual where the living gather around the dead and say farewell, whether jungle tribes, desert nomads or the Greeks of the Iliad feasting for nine days to mourn Hector. The wake could be our species’ oldest and most universal tradition – and one that has disappeared from many cultures in living memory, without anyone noticing.