Keening and catharsis

Yeats deals a lot with the nature of death, but in my folklore class, we have recently taken a different tack: the practice of keening and the old traditions of the wake. Funerals in Ireland are still huge community events. Last week two volunteer fire fighters were killed in a fire, and the news today showed the funeral processession through the town. It was huge! The whole entire town turned out to march behind the coffins, draped in the Irish flag, lead by a bagpiper, to the church which filled to overflowing. The service was piped outside the church on loudspeakers so those who had to stand outside could hear it.

In the folklore class, we were looking at pre-19th century funerary rites which included wakes and keening. The Irish word for keening is "Caoineadh" and one of the most famous Caoineadh is the "An Caoineadh Airt O Laoghaire" from the 18th century. The folklore of the keening woman is fascinating. Since the 4th century the Catholic church has been writing against the practice of the wake and keening. Despite this opposition, keening at wakes continued into the 19th century. Keening was done by professional older women who were often hired to facilitate the keening at a wake. This older woman would be the focus point for the family's grief and faciliate the grieving process. She was also seen as sort of a medium who would help comfort the soul and help it find its way from this world into the next. The stories say that she (the group of keening women) would create these elaborate grieving performances of great weeping, raging, and loving poetry to properly mourn and celebrate the life and death of the person. Their hair would be loose and flying around, their clothing would be in disarray, their anger would be raging, and their grief would be wild. Not much of the extemporaneous lament poetry is recorded because the keening was perceived to be such a powerful act of ushering the dead between the worlds. It was not allowed to be recorded, and it was not considered good to put it in writing.

The laments that are kept are powerful pieces of poetry. They included urging the dead person to get up and quit being dead, cursing the dead for causing so much grief, cursing the ones who were responsible for the death, telling the dead person how beloved they were, and celebrating the acts of the person in life. From the accounts, the keening was a professional and powerful show. The folklorists hypothesize that the keening woman, through her performance and her poetry, would help the family and the community assembled at the wake to vividly travel through the stages of grief (per Kuber Ross), and help the family reintegrate into the community.

The Catholic church is violently opposed to the practice. Even in a 1990's video called "Waking the Dead" (a great video) a funeral director says that it is so much better to have a funeral taken over by a funeral home, and not have the dead person at home, because it takes all the stress out of the family having to make tea for the visitors. I swear, the guy on the video says that! I almost fell out of my chair, it was so crass. But the Catholic church also wrote in a 19th century synod that wakes were bad because of the expense the family went to in providing food and drink for the guests. The church maintained that all that money would be better spent by giving it to the church. I am not kidding: this is officially recorded.
Did the people writing that realize how crass that sounds?

My project is involved with how the modern mental health agencies are coming back around to valuing the traditional wake practices that were almost completely stomped out by the Famine, funeral homes, and the Catholic church. In the Journal Of Palliative Medecine, there is an article about how the keening practices were actually quite valuable as a way of helping people deal with grief. In the Irish Journal of Grief Counseling, there is an article that found when people got together after a family member died, and they talked about the person, they felt better. Surprise surprise.

Actually, folklorists have posited that the church and the funeral homes are opposed to home wakes because it takes the locus of control of death out of their hands. Power grabs do often seem to underscore issues like this. Of course the power of these Wild Keening Women must have scared the holy hooley out of the priests. Worse, here were older women in the community with power that should rightly belong to the priest. They HATE it when old ladies have respect and power. I can't help but think about the story I heard from Priscilla about trying to have a little wake for a family member where they had set candles at the head and foot, and were reading prayers, when the firemen came in to retrieve the body. The person had been gone for about an hour, but they wanted to resusitate her. Priscilla reports that she said, "But she's dead." The firemand protested, "But don't you want her to live?!" and Priscilla had to point out once more, "But she's dead." Evidently the fireman was so distraught that he couldn't do his life-saving job that all he could do was put out one of the candles. This is such a poignant story of how conflicted our modern lives are concerning death and the leave taking it requires.