The Beauty of an Irish lament

From The Daily Undertaker

Funerals are the means through which we travel from death, back into life. They are important and meaningful to us as individuals and as a culture. In contrast to the United States, where funerals and other memorial rituals seem to be on the wane, the people of Ireland hold fast to their funeral traditions.

The following article by Marie Murray, ...conveys the importance and meaning of funerals better than any I've read in a long time.

Funerals form an integral part of Irish life, Recognising the beauty of an Irish lament

WHATEVER HAS been lost in Irish culture, the tradition of funeral going has not died. Attending funerals remains an integral part of cultural life.

Funeral going is psychologically complex. It is comforting to those who mourn; recognition of the life of those who have died; and a celebration of their existence. It allows lament for their departure and acknowledgment of the loss for those who loved them.

Funeral attendance is a statement of connection, care, compassion and support. It encircles those who grieve and enriches those who attend because it connects each person there to the profundity of living and the inevitability of death. Funeral attendees witness the raw emotions of grief and the extraordinary capacity of the human spirit to love.
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But there is psychological reason, social solidarity and cultural cohesion in funeral attendance, and even as the ceremonies, the belief systems they operate from or the expression of grief may change, the meaning of marking death remains, and long may we travel highway and byway to do so.

For St Patrick's Day, here is an Irish lament.

While out for a run on the beach....

A single engine plane from Orlando was flying up the coast when it began experiencing engine trouble.  After oil began to leak on the windshield blocking the view of the pilot and a propeller fell off, the pilot decided to make an emergency landing on the beach near the Hilton Head Marriott Resort and Spa.

Then it hit and killed a jogger running on the beach.

U.S. jogger killed after plane crash-lands on top of him as he runs on the beach

His name was not released.

UPDATE.  Robert Gary Jones, a 38-year-old father of two was jogging and listening to his iPod when he was hit from behind and killed by the small plane which glided to an emergency landing on the beach.

What a tragedy.  Condolences to his poor family

Momento Mori

I found this striking image at the Crescat, Prince of Orange, René de Chalons, died in battle in 1544, at age 25. His widow commissioned the sculptor Ligier Richier to represent him offering his heart to God, set against the painted splendour of his former worldly estate. Church of Saint-Étienne, Bar-le-Duc.

She is one of those Morbid Catholics and declares
Catholicism is the punk rock of religions. The Church is fearless in Her embrace of death. We love our relics, cherish our martyrs, talk to the dead and pray for a happy death!

Momento Mori is the Latin phrase translated as 'Remember you must die'.  It also names an entire genre of art most often found in cemeteries that reminds people of their own mortality and short time here on earth.  There is a subgenre called Vanitas to describe a still life featuring symbols of mortality and often including a skull.  Below is Vanitas by Phillipe de Champaigne symbolizing Life, Death and Time.

"Remember you must die", momento mori is one of those universal spiritual truths that we all know and too often forget.    "Keep death daily before you," urges the Rule of St. Benedict.  In the HBO series Six Feet Under, Nate Fisher runs the family funeral home with his brother after his father is killed by a bus.  Nate, who never wanted to go into the family business, is asked by a grief-stricken woman whose aunt , the only person who truly loved her, died in a freak accident, "Why do people have to die?"  Nate is silent than says poignantly., "To make life important."

The key to living life intensely is to keep the awareness before us as much as we can.  You can even have a momento mori on your iPhone.    It's called  Vanitas and I have it.

"Ain't No Grave"

Daniel Kalder reviews the new CD Johnny Cash-American VI: Ain't No Grave

Well there ain’t no grave
Gonna hold my body down
Well there ain’t no grave
Gonna hold my body down
When I hear that trumpet sound
I’m gonna get up out of the ground

The song mixes defiance with a joyful declaration that death is not the end. And it is this bedrock of faith, of an elemental Christianity that liberates Cash from fear and informs the rest of the album. This is the sound of a man at peace with himself, with his life, who is ready to meet his Redeemer. Indeed, he’s so at peace he can take a Sheryl Crow song, Redemption Song and make you forget about her musings on toilet paper and suspect for the first time that she might actually be a talented songwriter. Then he takes Kristofferson’s For the Good Times- basically a song in which a horny goat tries to emotionally blackmail his ex into giving him some pity sex- and turns it into a moving reflection on a long life nearly at its end. The fourth track, 1 Corinthians 15:55 is the last song Cash ever wrote and begins with the lines from scripture:

Oh Death where is thy sting?
Oh grave where is thy victory?

Before Cash continues with a plea to God for shelter, guidance, forgiveness and mercy; but it’s a plea given in the certainty that God is merciful, delivered over a cheerful waltz. Cash knows that if he asks, he shall receive.

"The Scene of Insurmountable Grief"

Christian villagers wail as hundreds of Nigerians slaughtered in machete 'revenge' attacks are buried in mass graves

Nigerian villagers wailed in the streets as dump trucks carried hundreds of bodies past burned-out homes towards a mass grave.

This was the scene of insurmountable grief after rioters armed with machetes slaughtered more than 500 people in a revenge attack following religious clashes near Nigeria's city of Jos.

The killers had shown no mercy. They didn't spare women and children, or even a four-day-old baby, from their machetes. In one area alone, five babies and 28 children aged five or less were killed.

Rubber-gloved workers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave.

Some 300 Christian churches have been destroyed in the area around Jos during the past four years. In an interview with Aid to the Church in Need, Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama of Jos described his efforts to have friendly relations with Muslims, the effects of the local imposition of Sharia, and the caution with which he catechizes potential Muslim converts, some of whom “come just because they want to infiltrate.”

The nation of 142.5 million is 15% Catholic.

The governor of the area where the massacre occurred accused the country's military chiefs of ignoring warnings about last weekend's massacre.

Officials said more than 500 people from the mainly Christian Berom ethnic group were hacked to death with machetes, axes and daggers in three villages of Dogo Nahawa, Ratsat and Zot on Sunday morning.

There seems to be a cycle of religious violence that's growing as the country's leadership falters.

Since January, a cycle of violence has erupted in Plateau state and around the city of Jos. Hundreds of civilians have been killed, most recently in a massacre on Sunday of at least 380 Christian villagers. The violence has split along religious lines and calls for independent investigations have not yet been heeded.
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Nigeria’s diverse population and recurrent waves of tribal and sectarian violence have imposed a delicate power sharing system between the Muslim northerners and Christian southerners. The presidency rotates between the two communities, although each presidential ticket must include one representative of each. And yet, in the absence of improved governance and with approaching elections, this division of power has perpetuated sectarian politics.

Philip Jenkins. a professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State writes  in the Third World War:

In Jos, as in countless other regions across Africa and Asia, violence between Christians and Muslims can erupt at any time, with the potential to detonate riots, civil wars, and persecutions. While these events are poorly reported in the West, they matter profoundly
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Uncomfortably for American policymakers, it is a war of religions and beliefs—a battle not for hearts and minds but for souls.
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The relationship between Christianity and Islam poses a challenge for at least half of the 20 nations expected to have the world’s largest populations by 2050

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One factor driving Islamic militancy in many nations is the sense that Christianity is growing. Outside of the West, evangelism and conversion are two of the most sensitive issues in the modern world.

Body of former President stolen for ransom

Three months passed before the stolen body of the former President of Cyprus, Tassos Papadoplous, was discovered in a shallow grave.

Thieves had stolen the body to hold it for ransom said the government in Cyprus even as the family denied a ransom request was made.

The report Ex-president's body stolen for ransom explains that the police received a tip-off that he had been buried in the grave of another person.  DNA evidence confirmed the proper identification.

Nurturing a virtual baby, ignoring and starving their real one

South Korean couple starved child while raising 'virtual baby'

The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life, because they didn't have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby," said Chung Jin-won, a police officer.

"They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby."

"Come on seven," is the last phrase of hers that I can remember

John Zmirak Must Die

I'll never forget my mother sitting at home on our couch (as she did until two days before she died -- through a Catholic home hospice) with the computerized morphine drip that gave her steady, always insufficient doses of the stuff, as the tumor quietly thrived -- a tumor she'd earned over decades through the Marlboro "Lungs for Clothing" trade-in program. (Which is really neat, by the way: You send them little pieces of your lungs, and they ship you t-shirts and jackets with their logo. Mom had quite a collection by the end.) Having spent the better part of 20 years at bingo and high-stakes poker games in church basements all through the Diocese of Brooklyn, and slightly addled by the opiates, my mother became convinced that the numbers on the morphine drip were part of a lottery -- and if her number came up, she would "win" and get back her health. In her smoke-stained fingers she clutched the sterile medical plastic, squinting at the numbers on the readout. "Come on seven," is the last phrase of hers that I can remember

Lobbyist against domestic violence kills husband in domestic dispute

Married only five days, 26-year-old Anthony Rankins was shot and killed in a domestic dispute by his 45-year-old wife who was a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.

Woman charged with killing husband is lobbyist

Message from smoker on his funeral hearse

Dick Whittamore's last wish granted when his hearse bore the message Smoking Killed Me

Killed by bureaucracy

Even though they had the equipment to save her,  because of a bureaucratic memo, firefighters stood by and just listened to her cries for help.  When the mountain rescue team was called in, they brought up the woman who died of a heart attack.

Firefighters left woman in mine shaft for six hours due to 'health and safety concerns'

An injured woman lay for six hours at the foot of a disused mine shaft because safety rules banned firefighters from rescuing her, an inquiry heard yesterday. As Alison Hume was brought to the surface by mountain rescuers she died of a heart attack.

A senior fire officer at the scene admitted that crews could only listen to her cries for help, after she fell down the 60ft shaft, because regulations said their lifting equipment could not be used on the public.
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It would have been possible to pull Ms Hume up had it not been for the memo.

No way to go

After he crashed into a power pole, he relieved himself and didn't see the live wire in the roadside ditch.

Washington man electrocuted by urinating on power line

"Society no longer knows how to deal with death"

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, Archbishop Nichols calls for culture that encourages spiritual preparation for death

Speaking in his homily at a Mass for the Sick at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday, Archbishop Vincent Nichols reflected on death and suffering in health care. He advocated a culture of “true compassion and healing” that does not fear death but prepares for it with prayer, the sacraments, and “daily abandonment to God.”
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“A culture of true compassion and healing fosters a deep respect and attentive care of the whole person, it promotes genuine care characterized by a sense of humility, a profound respect for others, and a refusal to see them as no more than a medical or behavioral problem to be tackled and resolved. To care in this way is a gift of oneself to another. And, as with all true giving, the giver also receives.”

Rejoicing in Christian faith, the archbishop said, makes clear the “very fundamental truth” that each person has a God-given dignity and “a quality of life in relationship to God that can never be reduced to its external human behaviors.

“From the outside a life might seem restricted, reduced or burdensome,” the archbishop noted. “But from within, where the love and comfort of God is experienced, that same life might well be rich in both experience and promise.”
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We do not know how to deal with death. But fear cannot be our guide,” Archbishop Nichols stated.

He cited the Bishops of England and Wales’ recent document which said that respecting life and accepting death must be priorities in end-of-life care.

“We should never try to bring about death,” they wrote, but accepting death means that we should prepare properly and not “flee from the inevitable.”

“A religious person will see both life and death as coming from God,” the bishops added, describing each human being as “more than a bundle of genes and actions.”

The bishops said a “reductionist” mode of operating health care is a “hidden violence” in the system, stressing that death cannot be reduced to a “clinical event.”

Instead, Archbishop Nichols added, the “spiritual being of every person” must be central to health care, especially at the time of death.

“This moment is central to our pilgrim journey. We practice for it, day by day, rehearsing our final act of trust with smaller daily acts of abandonment to God, in prayer, in kindness towards others, and in our sacramental life.”

Death at SeaWorld as Killer Whale Attacks

1 killed in whale attack at SeaWorld’s Shamu Stadium

Park guest Victoria Biniak told Local 6 that the trainer was a veteran of SeaWorld and had just finished explaining to the audience the show they were about to see.

At that point, Biniak said, the whale came up from the water and grabbed the woman.

"He was thrashing her around pretty good. It was violent,'" Biniak told Local 6.

The whale "took off really fast in the tank, and then he came back, shot up in the air, grabbed the trainer by the waist and started thrashing around, and one of her shoes flew off."

She said sirens went off and everyone was forced to leave the stadium.

It happened during a Dine with Shamu event

The Fields of Less Than Nothing

Just an amazing, horrific, inspiring story by Matt Labash called Love Among the Ruins about the amazing Father Rick Frechette in Haiti.

Every Thursday—since long before the earthquake—Frechette and a band of Haitian volunteers trek to the city morgue and claim the nameless dead, who lie naked in bloated heaps on a blood-streaked concrete floor. “You’ve heard of Tuesdays with Morrie,” Frechette smiles, “this is Thursdays with the Krokmo” (a Creole pejorative term for undertaker. It translates as the “death hook,” meaning the show is over). The place is jammed and the dead often piled seven or eight high. The workers there are so inured to the stench and spectacle, that Frechette has seen a morgue attendant slaloming on roller blades around the bodies and workers eating their lunch while sitting on stacks of cadavers as though on breaktime in the office kitchenette.

In Haiti, even before the quake, dead bodies were nothing more than background music—as commonplace as they are unnoticed. If they didn’t end up in the stark death-cave that is the general hospital morgue, they were burned in the streets on the spot where they died (a pragmatic hygiene concern). The decency and sentimentality that a better-developed society affords are luxuries here. Father Rick and his men gather the bodies themselves, packing them into makeshift coffins fashioned from supermarket cardboard boxes. They then truck them outside the city, up a sun-bleached highway that runs alongside the Caribbean Sea, to the rolling wastelands of Titanyen, which translates from Creole as the “fields of less than nothing.” A New Orleans-style Haitian jazz-funeral band—all horns and drums—plays graveside. Father Rick, an irreverent sort, calls them “The Grateful Dead.” Then he and his men plant the cardboard coffins in large holes dug by their own gravediggers, endowing their cargo in death with a tiny modicum of the dignity that eluded them in life.
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He’s been doing the morgue runs for 15 years, but has never gotten used to the smell. It makes him so sick, he brings along rum and cigarettes. “People ask me if I smoke,” he says. “Only on Thursdays.” The Haitians avail themselves of the goods, but for Frechette, they’re not optional. Without the spirit’s fumes and cigarette smoke chasing the smell of the dead out of his nostrils, he vomits, which his Haitian colleagues find amusing.

When he returned to Haiti right after the earthquake, there was an overflow crowd at the morgue, literally thousands of dead laid out in the street in front of it. “They were picking them up with backhoes and bucket-loaders, dumping them into trucks,” says Frechette, adding that the machines crunched the bodies against the walls in order to be able to scoop them. “They were hanging out the sides like crabs in a bucket. Really, really terrible. It was so shocking, so disgusting, I yelled, ‘Give me a cigarette!’ ”
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When I ask him how he could head back into the jaws of Haiti just a day after burying his mom, he tells me of her death. She knew it was happening, and she had time to prepare, had the best care, had lived a full life, and died with her family surrounding her. When he asked his mother why she wasn’t afraid, knowing she’d die, she told him that she “believes in God, and if she looks at the whole trajectory of her life, life has been very good, why start mistrusting it?” “I think the fuller your life is, the less death is a threat to you,” says Father Rick. “Empty people are scared to death to die.”

While watching TV

You would think there is no safer place than your home where ensconced on your couch you watch TV.  Not always.

British couple killed watching TV after Spanish villa's roof collapses on them after 60 days of rain

A British couple were crushed to death when the roof of a farmhouse collapsed on them following a mudslide.

Expats Christopher Martin, 63, and his wife Christine, 64, were visiting friends at the remote country home in southern Spain.

They were buried under 6ft of rubble while sitting on a sofa watching television at the whitewashed farmhouse in the Andalusian village of Rubite.


Is that a good death, no way to go or a fitting death?  I say no way to go.

"A thumb in the eye of the Nazis"

2000 living descendants

WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Mrs. Schwartz was a member of the Satmar Hasidic sect, whose couples have nine children on average and whose ranks of descendants can multiply exponentially. But even among Satmars, the size of Mrs. Schwartz’s family is astonishing. A round-faced woman with a high-voltage smile, she may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.
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Mrs. Schwartz had a zest for life and a devotion to Hasidic rituals, faithfully attending the circumcisions, first haircuts, bar mitzvahs, engagements and weddings of her descendants. With 2,000 people in the family, such events occupied much of the year.

Stop stealing cars or you'll get yourself killed

"Stop stealing cars or you'll get yourself killed" said the mother to her son.

He didn't.  He did.  Along with three of his friends in a fireball crash.

A Man's Primer on Funeral Etiquette

From the Art of Manliness, A Man's Primer on Funeral Etiquette

“How we treat the dead says an awful lot about how we live. For the strong and able to serve the helpless dead, to honor frail remains, reaches deep inside us to something basic to humanity.”

-Paul Gregory Alms

But being a gentleman of tact, respect, and sensitivity is never more important than at the occasion of someone’s death. Instead of adding distractions and stress to the already grievously burdened, be a source of great comfort. People are at their most fragile, and your job as a man of honor is to be supportive and dignified.

Dick Francis, Jockey and Writer, R.I.P.

One of my very favorite mystery writers, Dick Francis, has died at 89.  If ever I was feeling depressed, I would listen to one of his audiobooks, and feel by the end that some order had been restored to my world.

Telegraph obituary
As a National Hunt jockey, Francis had ridden in 2,305 races and ridden 345 winners. He became part of racing folklore when, in March 1956, he rode the Queen Mother's horse, Devon Loch, in the Grand National.

Francis and Devon Loch had just jumped the last fence, well clear of the rest of the field and set to break the previous record time, when suddenly, 30 yards from the winning post, with the race commentators screaming "Francis wins!", Devon Loch sank on his hindquarters, his front legs sprawling; having pulled a muscle in doing so, he could not recover to win the race.

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Whatever the cause, Francis's failure to win the Grand National remained the great sorrow of his life, though it was his determination not to be labelled for all time as "the man who lost the Grand National" that spurred him on to become a writer.

He had more than his fair share of accidents and breakages, which he liked to recount with pride mixed with a certain gory relish. He reckoned to fall off once every 11 or 12 races: "I've had a fractured skull, six broken collar bones, five broken noses, no end of ribs. Well, you simply stop countin'."
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This was typical Francis and, like their author, his fictional heroes endure all manner of pain and physical and mental torment with exemplary patience and composure. Thirtyish, usually dark-haired, sallow-skinned, mild-mannered and self-deprecating, the typical Francis hero is as intrepid and resourceful and as vigorously heterosexual as James Bond; but unlike the caddish Bond they are also decent and chivalrous, and the reader knows they will turn into faithful, passionate husbands: "What it comes to," Francis liked to say, "is that I never ask my main character to do anything I wouldn't do myself."

Where other thriller writers probed the darker crannies of the soul, Francis reaffirmed the values of human decency and the struggle between the man of good against the forces of lust for power, dishonesty and greed. Heroes can expect to be chained, beaten, burned or flayed two or three times per book – but good always triumphs in the end.
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Like his heroes, Francis was a man of stern self-discipline. From 1962, when his first novel, Dead Cert, was published, he produced a book a year, starting to write on January 1 and delivering the typescript to his publishers by April 8 for publication in September. Only once, when his wife was ill, did he deliver two weeks late.

London Times Obituary

Richard Stanley Francis was born 1920 in the village of Lawrenny on the Cleddau river in Pembrokeshire. His grandfather had been a keen amateur rider. His father was a horse-dealer, steeplechaser and farmer, and became the manager of a hunting stable near Maidenhead. Dick learnt to ride when he was 5 and won his first race at the age of 8.
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In 1939 he joined the RAF as a tradesman, but was soon commissioned as a pilot and, during the next five years of war, flew both fighters and bombers operationally. In 1945 he met, at his cousin’s wedding, a university educated and highly literate schoolmistress, Mary Margaret Brenchley, whom he married two years afterwards despite considerable opposition from both families on the ground that they had so little in common.

It was to be an outstandingly happy marriage.

New York Times obituary
Dick Francis, whose notable but blighted career as a champion steeplechase jockey for the British royal family was eclipsed by a second, more brilliant career as a popular thriller writer, died on Sunday in the Cayman Islands, where he had a home. He was 89.

This self-contained world was, of course, a reflection of a broader universe in which themes of winning and losing and courage and integrity have more sweeping meaning. As the critic John Leonard wrote, “Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses is like not reading Dostoyevsky because you don’t like God.”
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Typically, the Dick Francis hero is a modest, decent fellow, a model of British valor and integrity, who restores order by asserting his superior moral values — and by going mano a mano with a ruthless villain who subjects him to unspeakable torture.
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“Writing a novel proved to be the hardest, most self-analyzing task I had ever attempted,” Mr. Francis said, “far worse than an autobiography.” He went about his unaccustomed chore cautiously and methodically, as he might have approached a skittish horse. Working in pencil in an exercise book, he would labor over one sentence until he was satisfied that he could do no better, then move on to the next sentence.
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One of the most honored of genre authors, Mr. Francis was named to the Order of the British Empire and later made a commander. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Mystery Writers of America three times and was made a grand master, the group’s highest honor, in 1996. He also received the Diamond Dagger award, the highest honor of the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain, in 1990.

'It's 11 o'clock tomorrow, isn't it?'

Heartbroken widow passes away at exact moment her husband is being laid to rest

A heartbroken widow who survived her husband of 70 years passed away at the exact moment his funeral was taking place.

Grieving Irene Edwards, 88, hardly spoke a word after her beloved husband Fred, 96, died on 1 January.
She had been in hospital for two weeks after breaking a hip and had not spoken of her husband's death until the night before his funeral, when she asked: 'It's 11 o'clock tomorrow, isn't it?'

The following day, at exactly 11 o'clock, while her family laid her husband to rest, Irene passed away from a broken heart in Worcestershire Royal Hospital.

Their son Tony Edwards said: 'It was a major blow to us all. I was at an all-time low and people were beside themselves when the news came through.  It was absolutely awful and for it to happen at that precise moment, at 11 o'clock - it's just odd. You can never imagine two things like that happening at the same time.'