Virg:Having asked you how you are doing, gives me an opening to tell you how I am doing, sort of.
I lost a childhood friend the other day. Not been very close in recent years and was not even aware of his critical health problems. Ticker stopped apparently, overburdened with many systemic problems. Great pragmatic guy, harmless and jolly. No service they said, only an Irish style wake! That would be Bran.
Too many business friends though, I suppose. They had no idea how a wake should be. Not a single story, not a single drunk, no music. All the more shame as he was young enough to be survived by friends that could still lift a glass.
(Personally I plan to out live most of my few friends or have run them off. I am doing pretty good on both fronts.)
However, I learned a few lessons about giving a wake, which I share because it seems such a good alternative to a "service", at least for those among us not looking to be serviced.
1. Don't say the event is private - people think they have to be invited and no one, especially in that situation, will know everyone to invite. Call it a wake in the obit, open to all who knew the deceased.
2. Don't schedule it to start too early; they did four "until" (the untill reflected some sense of what it was suppose to be obviously). People were streaming out as we were driving up at six - going to dinner I suppose even though there was a fair spread of food at the event. Why not it was such a bore. 5:30 or 6:00 at the earliest (seven might be better) so people don't have a chance to get in and get out before it gets interesting. If they are too busy to come and stay a bit, it is just as well that they not come at all.
3. Have some music - including a Celtic/folk fiddle. Not loud and obnoxious but poetic and up lifting. Run the music for about forty-five minutes while people arrive. Have someone at the door telling people that the floor will be open for recollections at X. Hopefully more will stay. Have the music take a break when the open mic begins and quit greeting at the door, it becomes a distraction.
4. Have Someone MC, have good acoustics or a mic and actively solicit participation including some good ones to get the ball rolling good. This is best done by someone with a central view of the various facets of the decease's social network and life so they can knit together the speakers to connect the dots. Someone needs to be filling glasses. An untended self serve bar sends a wrong message of parsimony and distracts people from the central activity. Tell people that they don't have to be storytellers; just saying who they are and how they know the common friend is enough.
5. Perhaps the hardest these days, have the right kind of friends. Most people in this stuffy overly starched country of ours aren't up to the kind of openhearted displays that a good wake involves. (People pretend to be relaxed - suits at work being rare etc. but the truth is the country is hung up.) Most people need to go to the Presbyterian church and hear a couple of other people give a stiff rote run down on the stiff and go home. They think life is watch football on TV, when it is really about making and burying friends.
6. Turn the music back on when people have had their say so there is a pleasant atmosphere for people to further explore each other, mutual experiences with the deceased (now that they have been introduced to or reintroduced to during the open mic), where they came from and where they have been. If done right, after the event, there are new friendships made or remade to make for more good wakes in the future.
Instead we have "services" run and dominated by professionals, often with little real knowledge of the deceased, people with their own agenda who mouth hollow platitudes - almost by rote; then we pat our friends in the face with shoves and are done with it. A few loved ones may be asked to render brief speeches but these are monologues not dialogues. Such services offer little real opportunity to truly celebrate a life lived, to voice a story now complete but not yet told. A wake offers a chance to tell that story, as story that no one person but the deceased can know in its entirety.
It is a challenge to pull off a wake in our spread out mobile superficial culture though. In its natural setting, there would be few strangers at a wake. The story of one is the story of many others in a tight knit community, "remember jim when the three of us....". Any stranger present at a wake in its native habitat would stand out clearly and could therefore be easily absorbed and made to tell his or her part of the story for everyone else to hear. In our society funerals are full of mutual strangers. A wake needs a community, to come off naturally; in ours it needs active management.
Having learned all this I am dying to give it a try.
JTB
Fitten Wake Music:
The Parting Glass (Wailin' Jennys here)
Rosin the Bow-(Patrick Sky, Pennywhistlers, and Pete Seeger here)
Three Dog Night's Joy To The World
The Dead's Broke Down Palace
I'll Fly Away (Gillian Welch and David Rawlings here)
Blood Sweat & Tears-And When I Die.
Finnegan's Wake (Clancy Brothers here)
Iris Dement's Let the Mystery Be (See Post Below)
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