Death and the Irish: A Miscellany by Ryan,S. (Ed.). (2016)

Reviewed by: Dennis Klass, Webster University, St. Louis, MO, USA

To prepare myself for writing this review of Salvador Ryan’s Death and the Irish: A Miscellany, I had to learn the difference between a miscellany and an anthology. Wikipedia taught me:

In contrast to anthologies whose aim is to give a selective and canonical view of literature, miscellanies were produced for the entertainment of a contemporary audience and so instead emphasize collectiveness and popularity.

Ryan, professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Pontifical University, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Ireland, has edited a miscellany and a very entertaining one at that; it emphasizes collectiveness both as a literary form and in its content.

Many years ago, an Irishman who had a career in Democratic politics before he moved to the academic world often joined our faculty lunch group. After he recounted an interchange at which I had been present, I said, “That’s not the way I remember it.” He said, “Yes, but it is a better story this way.” ¹ In Death and the Irish, Ryan has given us 75 good stories about death and dying, each about three to five pages long. Many contain stories within stories or are stories about stories.

The Irish have, Ryan says in the introduction, a reputation for “a certain easiness around death, or, indeed for ‘doing death well’” (p. 5). And, he says, they have an affinity for stories, especially stories about and on the occasion of death. He introduces this collection with stories about the funerals of his youth and stories he remembers hearing at the funerals.

It is not clear how Ryan collected the stories. For most, we get no original publication information, though on occasion, we find an account of transmission or how the story changed over time. Some of the stories are very old, but freshly told. I got the impression that Ryan sat with some contributors over a pint or two and said, “Tell me a story that has death in it.” Then, “That’s a good one. Would you do me the favor of writing it down so I can put it in my book.”

The book’s content is about collective identity, that is, about cultural identity. “We co-create our cultural identities wherever we are,” Ann O’Conner says, “and the stories we tell about ourselves, shape who we are and who we become in the world” (p. 179). The identity the story tellers in the book care about is Catholic Irish. Among the contributors, we find 2 Murphys and 10 names beginning with O’ and 8 with Mc or Mac. A section of the alphabetic authors’ list has Darcy, Dodd, Donnelly, Dooley, and Finn. When a place is mentioned, the story tellers assume readers know where it is, and when a historical event or movement comes up, they assume readers know what happened and why it is important. Some stories assume some familiarities with the language that is always named Irish, not Gaelic. Outsiders can appreciate the stories as an art form and use these stories as a lens into the Irish mind about death, but the soul of the book is the Irish writing for the Irish. Ryan includes token contributions from Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and Pagan representatives, although the story implicit in these nods to multiculturalism is that they are descriptions from across wide cultural divides.

Any cultural identity is created by drawing a boundary between insiders and outsiders. The boundaries of Irish identity are firmly set in memories of oppressions that in this book are as early as the Norman invasion, but particularly by the English occupation and land grabs that intensified beginning in the reign of Elizabeth I. The occupation provoked revolts and reprisals culminating with the Easter Rising of 1916 that led to Ireland’s gaining its independence. The dual love of country and love of family we see in the letters by leaders of the Rising just before their executions reinforce their selfless heroism. Long-ago deaths and defeats live on. When an effigy of a 16th century Englishman who ordered an atrocity was excavated in the mid-19th century, a workman took his shovel and smashed it in half.

Identity boundaries also guard against acknowledging some realities. There are no stories in the book about the deaths and mass burials of children whom unmarried women were forced to give up to foundling homes staffed by Catholic nuns, ² nor are there any stories about the Irish Republican Army’s terrorist bombings in the second half of the 20th century.

The book’s stories are roughly arranged in a historical chronology, beginning with the entomology of old words about death and an excavation of a sixth-century burial mound that contained the bodies of a young woman and a horse. The book ends with how people relate to the dead on Facebook. There are many diversions along the way because Ryan always has room for a good story. There are too many good ones for me to tell you here. More than a few grow from nostalgia for an idealized past. My favorite was about the priest who came to a dying man to hear his confession and fell asleep on the other bed in the room.

We have stories of good deaths and bad, murder, ghosts, wakes, funerals, visions and visitations, of how city morgues came to be built, of memorials for the high born as well as the poor, and of course of the Famine. In the modern era toward the end of the book, nostalgia is unavailable so the stories have less humor. Because Irish identity is more diffuse and Catholic orthodoxy has lost its political power, the stories are less collective. The Irish remain doggedly separated from England, but they have tied their fate firmly to the European Union. In that new union, the Irish seem to do death now about as well as the rest of us do.

It took me a long time to read Death and the Irish: A Miscellany because after I read a story that touched me, and there were many of those, I put the book down so I could savor it for a while before I read the next.

If you feel yourself to be Irish, Ryan’s book would be a fine gift to your relatives. It would also be a fine gift to yourself as a thanatologist as you learn to better understand yourself as you help dying and grieving people in a multicultural world. If you are not Irish, you could do worse than to read this and then enjoy your pint of Guinness or a nip of Jameson all the more.