FUNERAL

It seems a long time ago. And I reckon it is. I don’t quite know exactly how many years until I get home and refer to google. And yes, I find, it was, a long time ago. Thirty four years in fact. Thirty four years since I walked through  Little Bray behind the coffin of Seamus Costello, founder of the IRSP and the INLA. He’d been assassainated by another faction of republicanism, the one that included our current Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore. Not that  slippery Eamo was the actual assassain no, we’re just talking factions and movements and splits and vague discontents here, we’re talking the Irish way.

But anyway, it was all a long time ago.

Thirty four years ago.

Let the dead bury the dead.

Thirty four years after all that I’m walking through Little Bray again to another funeral. I’m older. My knee is sore. Not actually walking behind a coffin this time, no, I’ve just parked a car near Sunnybank and am headed to the graveyard. My wife H walks beside me. As ever. Yes there’ll be a day when one of us will walk alone at a funeral. But not quite yet. Today we’re together, at a family funeral. The burial of one of the older generation, maybe the last. Which kind of makes us part of the older generation now, I reflect. And that reflection bounces off the pain in my knee like something unwanted in a mirror.

This is our second funeral in as many weeks. The earlier was in Rathdrum, also in County Wicklow. Not that Little Bray is really in County Wicklow, not really. Yes they do call it County Wicklow now, but it’s on this side of the Dargle River, which makes it County Dublin. Hardly matters, these bureaucratic niceties. Particularly to me. I’m well out of it, living in the West of Ireland as I do. Handy enough that, being removed. Though there is a downside. In the past ten days I’ve had to travel twice across the country to attend funerals. And after this funeral now will travel back again. That car just parked in Sunnybank is merely borrowed in Dublin for the day. We’ll go back to Mayo by train.

In the old days, I tell  H the wife, Sunnybank was actually called Bloodybank, because of battles and slaughter and mayhem in the vicinity. Wild Wicklow men pouring across the Dargle to rape and pillage Dubliners every so often. She nods vaguely at the information. And I reckon I’ve told her that before. But then we’ve been married a long time. Running out of things to tell her. Whereas she’s doing the opposite. Discovering new things to tell me every day. Like not to forget this, and do this and don’t do that. As she moves inexorably along that path of a married woman’s life, from mistress, to friend, to nurse.

            Yep, cheerful enough, these funeral thoughts.

            We’re early at the graveside. The hearse is somewhere in the traffic. But the grave is ready. I look down into the hole. And know that down there, just below the discreet layer of earth at the bottom which covers an earlier coffin, just below that lies the body of the husband of the woman we’ve come to bury.

I knew him well. If I were Hamlet and was being written by Shakespeare I’d pick up his skull and orate. But I’m not Hamlet. I’m merely a middleaged man looking into a grave. And thing is…a middleaged man looking into a grave is looking back at his past, and towards his future too.

It’s a moment.

The coffin arrives on shoulders of grandsons. There are prayers, but not too many.
A relation comes up to me.
"You'll be coming back to the house" he says.
I will.

Back at the house I sit alone in the garden, eating triangular sandwiches. Wife H is away working the crowd, like she’s standing for election. Or being polite, one or the other. I’m doing neither. I’m just sitting on a bench which I remember from fifty years ago when I was a little boy. It was in the garden of my grandmother’s house in Dalkey. And before that I know…I know because I’ve seen it in old photos…it was in the garden of another house in Dalkey. Grandfather’s House. I wrote a book of that name.

Beside me here is a marble topped garden table. That too came from my Granny’s house in Dalkey. And, as a little boy, I took tea at it with her. My new novel The Nottingham Road Hotel will reveal all. When I finish the damn thing.

A blonde woman sits down beside me. (At the bench, not in the novel). She is bright and bubbly and her name is Siobhan. And when I learn her name I think of my own dead daughter. Buried in Connecticut. And how her name was Siobhan too.

I think of this while we laugh together, Siobhan and I. And as we laugh I suddenly wonder… which particular Siobhan am I sharing the laughter with? With my dead daughter or with this living woman?

But then, what else to do at a funeral?

Except laugh, and wonder.

And let the dead bury the dead.

Conan K.