Singing Through the Wake

Frank McCourt described how the community of his beloved Limerick, Ireland would gather for the wake of a dead friend or relative. The body would lie in one room, and you would go there first to say a prayer and have a few somber moments. Then, you would enter the next room to console the widow and speak kind words of the one now gone from you. You would raise a pint in the deceased’s memory and reiterate how sad you were for all the troubles. Soon, someone would offer a funny story about your dead friend, followed by several more, then eventually someone would call out the name of his favorite song and everyone would belt out the tune. The music would grow, and the spirited melodies would carry them into the night. The younger folk would dance through the wee hours. “The idea,” Frank said, “was that the entertainment was so good, the stories were so good, the dancing was so good, the singing was so good – that if the dead could stay dead through this, they’re really dead.”

“That,” Frank added “is why we call it a wake.”

And even if the dead refused to rise, those singing and dancing found their souls reinvigorated, awake. Their hearts were heavy with grief but sturdier toward the life that stretched before them. There is a joy only those acquainted with true sorrows know, a joy hard won. A joy of protest. A joy of belligerent hope.

If our response to the the world’s anguish (whether anger or retreat, despondency or especially a righteous-sounding battlecry) has forgotten to listen to the music, to tap the toe, to rib a friend at the hilariousness or absurdity of it all, then I will not join that monotone chorus. I can not. The pains we must endure in this world exact too high a price to be wasted on such small-sighted visions. I want to sing the songs that make the people dance, even in the house of sorrows. I want to tell the stories that rouse the dead.

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