{"id":620181,"date":"2026-09-10T08:42:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T08:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/620181\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T08:42:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T08:42:10","slug":"my-english-friend-was-shocked-that-i-got-drunk-at-my-grandmothers-funeral-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/620181\/","title":{"rendered":"My English friend was shocked that I got drunk at my grandmother\u2019s funeral \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a call from my English<\/a> friend the morning after my grandmother\u2019s wake. She asked why I sounded so gruff. Hungover, I told her. There was a pause. <\/p>\n

\u201cBut weren\u2019t you at your grandmother\u2019s family wake yesterday?\u201d Well, exactly, I thought. Yes, I said. <\/p>\n

\u201cDid your whole family have a bender or something?\u201d she asked, half-joking, half in disbelief. Fair question, I thought. Let\u2019s see if I can actually explain this. <\/p>\n

My grandmother had been to her own brother-in-law\u2019s wake only a couple of weeks before she died, in Limerick<\/a>. She delivered her famous rendition of The Hills of Shanagolden at the graveside in the afternoon, then drank everyone under the bar that evening. <\/p>\n

After she died her funeral followed that familiar shape. <\/p>\n

Her remains came home to the living room in which my grandmother had raised generations. There was no guest list. Neighbours, distant cousins, the postman, people I did not recognise, all of them were welcome to walk through the door, murmur a prayer and stand with my grandmother for a moment, see her one last time. <\/p>\n

Twenty of us crowded into that same room hours later as the undertaker put the lid on the coffin. At Mass the next morning, the church was fuller than usual, with parishioners alongside those who hadn\u2019t seen the inside of a church in years. At the burial, prayers that many only half-remembered, were recited as my grandmother was lowered into her grave.<\/p>\n

And then, after the hotel lunch that followed, almost without anyone deciding it, the whole thing moved into the bar next door, where the stories started up again. My cousin asked if I\u2019d have a drink in my grandmother\u2019s honour, so I ordered her favourite cocktail, Sex on the Beach, which she always loved ordering for its fruity taste and risqu\u00e9 name.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0The importance of ensuring a \u2018good Irish death\u2019 in BritainOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

My English friend found the drinking part bewildering. Surely a funeral isn\u2019t meant to be some kind of party? But it was the part before that, I realised, that she actually couldn\u2019t get past. <\/p>\n

\u201cIs this not a bit much?\u201d she asked. \u201cThe body, I mean. In the living room. Is that not hard to look at?\u201d <\/p>\n

I told her it was hard, of course it was, but that the hardness was partly the point. Seeing her dressed in her own front room, in the place she had actually lived, and seeing she was no longer alive, was what let the whole thing become real. Seeing it was believing it. <\/p>\n

My friend wasn\u2019t being squeamish, I don\u2019t think. She comes from a place where death is handled at a careful distance, and where that distance is its own kind of care: nobody is made to look at something before they\u2019re ready, nobody\u2019s last image of a person forced on them. I could see the sense in that, once she put it to me. I just couldn\u2019t quite feel it. <\/p>\n

I tried picturing her version properly, with a closed casket and a funeral arranged for whenever the family could manage it. Solemn, I thought, but only solemn. And contained, even in its seriousness.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt isn\u2019t really meant to have any joy about it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone at all?\u201d<\/p>\n

She thought about it. \u201cNot really, not how you mean. You\u2019re not supposed to look happy. Otherwise, people start to wonder whether you loved the person at all,\u201d she told me. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s the bit I keep coming back to. Because the whole of what I\u2019d just described to her, the rosary, the silence, the Mass, the burial, then the cocktails, doesn\u2019t fit into one register. <\/p>\n

We tell loud stories and we sit in silence. We cry and we celebrate. None of this gets rationed out in the correct order. My grandmother had just turned 80. She had three children, 12 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and a 60-year marriage. How can all of that fit into sadness alone? <\/p>\n

By the end of the call, my friend was still not about to change the way she planned her own family\u2019s future funerals. We hadn\u2019t agreed on much. We\u2019d each worked out, a little better, what we actually believed and why. A bender, she\u2019d called it, right at the start. A funeral, I told her. A bit of a bender, I guess. But it was so much more than either. It was our way. <\/p>\n

Hugo Harvey<\/a> is a writer and presenter from Cork who has lived across France and the UK. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I had a call from my English friend the morning after my grandmother\u2019s wake. She asked why I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,9686,61,60,10970,1396],"class_list":["post-620181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-common-ground","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-irish-abroad","tag-limerick"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}