Grief Without Gathering: COVID, Funerals, and the Irish Way of Death

Image: RTE.ie

In Ireland, we do death well. That might seem like an odd thing to say, perhaps even inappropriate to some, but to anyone who has grown up in this country or witnessed an Irish funeral, the sentiment rings true. We have cultivated, over generations, a cultural and communal instinct for mourning. We gather, we grieve, we reminisce, and most importantly, we do it together. Death in Ireland is not a quiet, individual sorrow; it is a collective, sacred rite.

But during COVID, all of that stopped.

I heard many stories during the pandemic of people who lost loved ones and were unable to grieve properly. There were no wakes. No proper funerals. No long lines of mourners trailing from the funeral home. No neighbour’s hands squeezing shoulders in silent solidarity. No "I'm sorry for your trouble". In place of all that there were livestreamed services; sometimes just a priest and a camera. There was the awkward, unsatisfying emptiness of trying to mourn through a screen. You could see the coffin, hear the eulogy, even say a prayer. But the soul of the ritual was missing: the people, the presence, the shared sorrow.

In some places, neighbours still tried to show their support. They lined the roads as the hearse passed by, standing in silence, two metres apart. That image of people spread out along country lanes in masked, socially distanced solidarity has stayed with many. Even in separation, there was togetherness but it was a poor substitute for the real thing.

Some of the grief from those deaths didn't settle properly. It hung in the air, disembodied. People tried to move on, to carry on and to tell themselves this was just how things had to be for now. But deep down, something had not been resolved. They hadn't been able to say goodbye the way we know how to say goodbye in Ireland and that felt unfinished.

It wasn't until more recently, when I experienced grief first hand at the funerals of my parents and my mother-in-law, that I began to understand what we had lost and what healing truly looks like.

All three funerals were large, traditional rural affairs. My parents' wakes were held in a local funeral parlour, where crowds of sympathisers queued for hours to pay their respects. People travelled long distances to be with us and to support us. It was moving to see such effort made, such quiet determination to be present. The queue stretched out into the evening, full of neighbours, colleagues, cousins, and friends who had shared some part of their lives with my parents and some who had never met them but wanted to support us in our loss. Their presence was an anchor. I'll never forget seeing my neighbours and friends from Naas who had travelled the three hour journey to Mayo, queued and paid their respects then sat into their cars and drove the three hours home, all on a dark wet November night and after a long working day. That's the Irish way, if you are in any way connected to the bereaved you turn up.

My mother-in-law's funeral was held at home, as she had always wished. We waked her in her own sitting room, surrounded by familiar furniture and framed photos and with her large extended family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and assorted in-laws all keeping watch with her. A wonderful meitheal of neighbours looked after the practicalities of directing traffic, making endless cups of tea, providing trays of sandwiches (there's something special about 'funeral sandwiches') so that we could focus on remembering her. There was something incredibly comforting about being in that space, so full of her, and welcoming others into it to say goodbye.

That presence matters more than we often realise.

My father was a great man for funerals (one of my brothers dubbed him 'The Minister for Funerals'). He understood the quiet power of simply showing up. He taught us that lesson through example, year after year, as he made time to be there for others in their moments of loss. He would travel the country at a moment's notice to attend a funeral because he understood that presence speaks when words fall short. And yet, despite having grown up with that example, I don't think I ever fully understood its depth until I experienced it myself. Standing in that funeral home, seeing familiar and unfamiliar faces alike, feeling the weight of solidarity around me I realised that presence is not just comforting, it's transformative. I will never again take for granted how much it matters to show up.

There is something about an Irish funeral that transcends grief. It gives shape to it. It gives permission to mourn, not in isolation, but within the fold of community. The ritual elements; the rosary, the procession, the burial, the gathering after are more than tradition. They are essential scaffolding for the emotional and spiritual work of saying goodbye.

Unlike in England, no one is invited to a funeral in Ireland. On hearing of a death, you check RIP.ie and figure out the practicalities; when and where the removal is, when the Mass is, and which one you can attend. There's no RSVP or no formal summons. The obligation is cultural, communal. You just go. You show up. It's understood.

During COVID, we were denied that scaffolding. Not out of malice, of course, but out of necessity. Still, the absence of ritual left wounds that many of us are only now beginning to understand. Families were forced to make heartbreaking decisions choosing who could attend and who would have to stay away. Sisters, sons, lifelong friends left to grieve from a distance, excluded not by choice, but by circumstance. What should have been a gathering of hundreds was reduced to ten masked mourners spaced out across pews. I have spoken to friends and family who still feel a strange limbo around the deaths they experienced in those years. Some have tried to hold belated memorials, but it's not the same. There's something about the immediacy of a wake, the rawness of the days just after a death, that can't be replicated months or years later.

We underestimated the trauma of that rupture. We told ourselves that Zoom funerals were sufficient, that watching from a distance was better than nothing. And maybe it was but it wasn't enough. Not for us. Not for a culture that has always leaned into grief rather than away from it.

We in Ireland have a deeply ingrained way of doing death. It goes back centuries. Long before modern funerals, we had wakes in cottages, we keened, we told stories by candlelight. We didn't fear death so much as make space for it. The person who died was still among us, laid out in the parlour or the front room, surrounded by the people who loved them. The women of the neighbourhood would wash the corpse and prepare it for burial. The men would dig the grave. Both tasks were considered an honour and a privilege, one last service we could do for this valued member of our tribe. We paid our respects not with formalities, but with presence.

COVID stripped that away. We were left with antiseptic rituals, pared back to the bare legal minimum. Ten people in a chapel. Masks and hand sanitizer. No singing. No wake. No gathering after. The virus forced us to privatize something that had always been public, to isolate ourselves when we needed others the most.

During that time, many of us found ourselves checking RIP.ie almost daily, looking up arrangements for those we couldn't see, couldn't visit, couldn't honour in person. We left condolence messages and short tributes, trying to bridge the gap through typed words. It became a strange substitute for the handshake at the door, the chat in the queue at the removal, the hug after the prayers. Certainly it was better than nothing but it was not the same.

Now, as I look back at the recent funerals of my parents and my mother-in-law, I am struck by how essential those rituals truly are and how blessed we were to be able to mark the end of each of their long lives in a fitting way. It was not just the chance to say goodbye that mattered, it was the chance to do so surrounded by people who knew them, who loved them, who remembered them. People who shared the weight of loss.

At each of those funerals, I saw the slow, sacred choreography of Irish mourning play out: the open house, the endless cups of tea and trays of sandwiches. the handshake and hug at the door, the removal to the church, the long procession behind the hearse, the shared silence at the graveside, the meal afterward and, yes the laughs and the stories. None of it is accidental. All of it has meaning.

There is something healing in that rhythm. It allows us to process grief in layers. First shock, then sorrow, then memory, then a kind of peace. And none of it happens alone.

In Irish culture, death brings people together more powerfully than almost any other event. It is a testament to the value we place on community, on remembering, on the sacredness of a life lived. It is not a formality; it is a deeply human need.

What we endured during COVID wasn't just loss, but the loss of our way of grieving and that has its own cost.

I think it’s important that we talk about that openly now. That we name the trauma for what it is. That we acknowledge the hole left not just by the people who died, but by the funerals that never happened, or happened in silence. We need to allow ourselves to grieve those losses again, properly, communally in our long cherished, uniquely Irish way.

There are no easy answers. We can't go back and re-do those funerals. But we can honour the dead by remembering what was lost, and by holding fast to the traditions that still remain. We can keep showing up for each other. We can keep telling the stories. We can keep making the tea, shaking the hands, and standing by the gates of graveyards on cold days, because that's what we do. That's who we are.

We do death well in Ireland. And when we can't, it leaves a mark. But we also do resilience well, and storytelling, and remembrance. The funerals of my parents and mother-in-law reminded me of that and reminded me that the best way to heal the wounds of the past few years is to keep leaning into the rituals that have carried us through centuries. They have stood the test of time for good reason.

Let us never take them for granted again.

Marianne Gunnigan June 2025

mariannegunnigan@gmail.com

086 2525132