Waking the dead

Born within the slipstream of our father’s andmother’s lives, we follow involuntarily in their wake. True dat! It's a sentence from early in My Father's Wake, how the Irish teach us to live, love and die (2017) by Kevin Toolis. Toolis was born and grew up in Edinburgh but Home was a modest storm-drubbed 3 room cottage on Achill Island, Co Mayo. He thus has cultural feet one planted on each side of the Irish Sea. Me, too.Whatever about The Past, End-of-Life issues are a foreign country: they do things differently (t)here.When we came back to Ireland in 1990, my boss was British but had been living and working in Dublin for 8 years. One afternoon the department had emptied for the funeral of a colleague's mother. Two pints down in the pub that night, the gaffer had admitted he would be appalled if I or anyone else gate-crashed the funeral of his father. otoh I have an old friend who was working in one of the Dublin Art Colleges. A colleague's mother died back home in London. My friend…