Dying the Good Death: Wake and Funeral Customs in County Tyrone

One Saturday morning, about three months after settling into Ballymongan townland, I woke a bit late and groggy from a music session in Eugene O'Donnell's kitchen the night before. I wandered outside to appreciate some rare sunshine and was greeted with a flat tire. Resigned, I crouched down to try replacing it without the benefit of proper tools and soon saw my neighbor Danny Gallen coming to greet me. I assumed that he was coming to offer me a hand.

"Did you hear about John?" he asked without inflection.

"John Mongan? He's in the hospital, right?"

"He's dead."

"Jesus." I fell back from my crouch to land on the ground with a thud. "I wasn't prepared for that . . . I really wasn't. . . ."

"No, none of us were."

For a moment, Danny simply had nothing more to say. He then glanced over the car and led me back to one of his outbuildings to look for the right spanner. With Danny's help some part of me went through the motions of replacing the flat—but all the while I was preoccupied, stunned by my sense of loss. Widely recognized as Aghyaran's unofficial curator of local oral traditions and material culture, John Mongan had long helped his neighbors make sense of the complicated present by offering lessons from the equally complicated, but very different, past. He was such a force in and embodiment of the community, perhaps I had assumed he would live forever, like the names that give the landscape meaning—Ballymongan, Trienamongan, and Termonamongan. The tire easily could have waited. Soon neighbors would gather to convey John's remains home, and until then Danny and I simply needed something to do.

In order to register death, express grief, and pay tribute, people need "things to do." We need customs. Faced with death, we who remain spend time together, and how we pass that time is a form of communication, a rhetoric enacted. At the center of Irish customs concerned with death and memorializing the dead is the wake, but there is also a broad range of custom worth considering that extends from death to burial and beyond. Many deaths greatly affected me during fieldwork, but I was most involved in the events surrounding the death of my neighbor John Mongan. I offer my account of these events, in part, as my own act of remembering a man who was dear to me and to many. This account also provides an entry into larger patterns in contemporary death and memorial customs in Aghyaran, a parish in western County Tyrone where the majority of residents are Catholic. My focus will remain on customs performed to pay respects to and memorialize the elderly who are deemed to have died a "good death"—emotionally and spiritually prepared and dying among loved ones at or near home.¹

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At two o'clock on the afternoon after John Mongan's death, Danny and I joined a column of cars traveling to Omagh to accompany John home from the hospital morgue. On the way, Danny remembered some of John's many selfless good works: running the parish bingo game, organizing church bazaars and pilgrimage tours, maintaining St. Patrick's Well, writing and collecting materials for the parish magazine, overseeing the historical society's preservation work, and helping revive Killeter Fair in 1997, a half-century after its demise. When we arrived at the hospital morgue in Omagh, people were milling in the parking lot in a light mist, exchanging only brief greetings and regrets while more cars arrived. There were roughly fifty men and women, chiefly from Ballymongan and adjoining townlands, and Danny reckoned it was the biggest turnout at the morgue for anyone in a long time.

Once the full crowd had gathered, undertakers Charlie Lynch and Sean O'Donnell, both Aghyaran men, directed people inside to a bleak...