Communities need TLC to thrive.
I am not a great man for attending funerals.
The fundamental reasons are laziness and lethargy for which I can plead only watery grounds for mitigation.
One is that I am a “blow-in” to the community in which I live, albeit one of thirty years standing — and therefore still as much on the outside looking in as I am just looking around me. Related, I lack conviction that my commiserations will afford any incremental consolation to the bereaved.
Alongside the above, there is a couple of “explanations” that don’t even count as mitigants.
First, I have the vague notion that if I stay away from other people’s funerals, I might escape the notice of the fates and survive longer before being forced to attend my own.
But second, I am not overly bothered about getting a good attendance at my own funeral as I won’t be alive to check who is there and, more important, who isn’t. So the notion that assiduous attendance at other people’s funerals might constitute insurance against nobody turning up for mine doesn’t move me at all.
Nonetheless, though I don’t walk the walk, I will happily talk the talk about the importance of funerals as a nurturer of the ties that bind communities, especially in rural Ireland where the notion of communities rooted first and foremost in local geography still has a resounding resonance.
A funeral I did attend recently was that of a man whom I am privileged to call a good and genial neighbour more than a close friend. Retired for some time, in his professional life, he had been a senior official in local government. More important for his community, he was, for many years, secretary of the local GAA club: Clooney-Quin.
This role is not sleepy pen pushing but a crucial junction of community engagement demanding many wakeful hours of alert service. It is central to the smooth operation of a club comprising many different teams competing in many different county-wide competitions. Information must flow in all kinds of different directions as reliably and speedily as life’s blood.
In most rural communities in Ireland the GAA club is a prominent reservoir of social capital and connective tissue, very often the principal one.
For this set of mourning rituals, as they have done many times, Clooney-Quin volunteers marshalled traffic and managed parking around the village to facilitate mourners queueing to pay respects in the church on the vigil of the funeral mass and for the mass itself, for which the church was packed.
All the rituals of rural funerals played out; the calls to the house, the clusters at crossroads to salute the passing hearse and its convoy, The green and red of Clooney-Quin was everywhere. Regret over a premature if not sudden loss was balanced by recognition of a decent life, a man who did well by doing good. Alongside the consolation of respect to the bereaved family, there is the unspoken nourishment and renewal for the rest of us, shared loss reinforcing common identity that defines a community as such.
The community and the bereaved are given foremost consideration in the way things are done. Religious and secular outlooks and beliefs merge in peaceful co-existence. The church itself and church ceremonies are still generally the core focal points but ones that are accommodating and inclusive rather than demarcatory and exclusive. I have attended funeral ceremonies in the local community centre that are as equally and easily accommodating of a religious dimension within a secular sphere. The cemetery itself is professionally agnostic.
Funeral undertakers are chosen because of personal connection or established local reputation. Their job is to combine efficiency with anonymity, to be discreet low-profile facilitators of ceremonies conducted in accordance with the wishes of the family rather than masters of ceremonies or conductors of the orchestra. They are stagehands rather than actors in the drama, barely visible and certainly inobtrusive.
Around about the same time as that local funeral, I came across a reflective piece in The Guardian entitled The ghosts haunting China’s cities[i] by Andrew Kipnis, a writer and researcher and a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong about the suppression of homage to the dead in at least some of China’s major cities. Kipnis has conducted direct investigations of contemporary funerary practices in both rural and urban China.
He was first exposed to rural practice in Shandong province where the rituals are typical of rural China generally.
After someone dies, the deceased’s body is typically kept at home in a coffin — sometimes made from cedar, now often refrigerated — for a few days between the death and the funeral. People come by and pay their respects to the body, give a gift, and offer condolences to the family. The funeral itself is organised and conducted by familial elders.
In the cities he visited (Nanjing, Shanghai and Hong Kong), the “management” of death has been sanitised and “airbrushed” out of the experience of living as much as possible.
As soon as a dead body is discovered in Nanjing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, it is removed from the home or hospital room and taken either to a hospital morgue or a funeral home. The funeral is organised and conducted by industry professionals rather than family members. After the funeral, the body is cremated and the ashes are buried in a cemetery or a columbarium located far from the city centre…
Mr. Kipnis identifies several reasons why this is so. They all have their roots in the rapid expansion and densification of many cities in China in which comparatively recently built multi-storey apartment blocks represent the dominant mode of residence for millions, many of them first generation migrants from a rural background.
Death has become separated from life. Most people in cities don’t die at home but in hospital from whence their bodies are quickly dispatched to a funeral parlour which manages the brisk journey thereafter to cemetery or crematorium and whose relationship to the bereaved is strictly commercial and transactional.
Family and household sizes have shrunk to match the limited living space.
Rather than a person’s entire social world being composed of relatives of varying degrees of distance, the social universe of urbanites is composed of a few close relatives and a larger society of strangers and acquaintances.
Renewal and destruction are the handmaidens of each other. The pace, density and scale of urban development has left a residue of a litter of abandoned buildings, neighbourhoods and factories which serve as reminders of and memorials to the wistful loss of former communities and ways of life.
Paradoxically, there are indications that the pace and intensity of urbanisation and the repression of death have made urban dwellers more rather than less superstitious than their rural counterparts.
According to Mr. Kipnis:
…fictional tales of ghosts, hauntings and unnatural deaths can be found online. Though these stories are not factual reports, I have found they reflect the experiences and anxieties of many who live in urban China: elderly parents left without family at the end of their lives; ghosts harming strangers (even leading them to take their own life); a pervasive fear of death; and a strengthening relationship between a fear of ghosts and the real-estate market.
Any ghosts and ghouls that roamed rural Ireland in the past were ruthlessly exterminated by the light cast on life by the spread of electricity. And while our main cities are expanding, it is in a much more haphazard and incremental, outward rather than upward fashion than has occurred in China.
Nonetheless, the degree to which the scale and pace of urbanisation in China has atomised and individuated comparatively new urban dwellers offers contingent warnings to Ireland.
Supply of new homes is now running at around 30,000 annually versus projected demand of 50,000. Bridging that gap will require a much more intensive and deliberate ratcheting up of home building than we have seen since the crash. It will probably require big development programmes on greenfield sites, for example, as was done at Adamstown in west Dublin.
Simply clustering decent numbers of people and families in close proximity to each other does not a “community” make. Spatial “communities” are based in people having a shared strong, positive sense of identity and appreciation of the place in which they live rather than having no concern for their “place” beyond their own four walls or, worse, a smouldering resentment of it.
Like the maturation of good whiskey, the passage of time alone can nurture a sense of constructive community among people living in close proximity to each other — but that is not guaranteed. Build big and wrong and time won’t get a chance. Plenty of existing ghettoised developments built during the latter half of the last century in the main towns and cities of Ireland provide ample testimony of that risk. The headwinds in the way of community formation are even greater to the extent that residences in new developments are financed and built for transient commercial rental rather than permanent ownership by their occupants.
There are worse things abroad than ghosts.
[i] The ghosts haunting China’s cities | China | The Guardian
