Mira qué bonita era by Julio Romero de Torres, 1895. Depiction of a wake in Spain.
I didn't have him as a teacher in high school, but I certainly knew of him.1 Somehow or another, I also knew that a student that was in school with us, and who my cousins knew, was not only his daughter, but also one of his students. Apparently that was awkward.
I don't do a good job of keeping track of former teachers. I probably couldn't tell you where a single one of them was, even the ones I really liked, let alone those I only sort of knew by association. In his case, there was our classmate, whom I also didn't know (she was a couple of years ahead of me), but he was also known to our parents. Without knowing for sure, in looking at it, I think that must have been because he was from a Catholic family here in town.
My classmate died the year before last. She was 62.
I read his obituary as he was so well known locally. And then I recalled there were bits and pieces of his story I'd picked up over the years.
His wife was also a teacher.
Sometime after I left high school, the couple apparently civilly divorced.2 He remarried, and apparently to an apparently significantly younger women whom I take was also a teacher. According to the obit, they had a child after he retired, who would now be about 31. He would have been about 56 when she was born. I can dimly recall my parents and my father's siblings talking about this as well, mostly in a somewhat bemused manner, given the difficulties of raising an infant, in their view, when you are that old.
When my classmate died, her mother was mentioned in the obituary. Indeed, her obituary characterizes both of her parents as loving, and contains praise of them.
His obituary mentioned both of his daughters by his first marriage, and then goes on about his second. His wife, the mother of my classmate, isn't mentioned at all. The obituary is profuse on his latter "marriage", calling that individual, named in the obituary, the "love of his life" amongst other things.
Of course, the dead don't write their obituaries. If they did, who knows how they'd read? We might all fear how they'd be penned. I've read plenty where a "first" and "second" spouse are mentioned. This one is profuse on his love of one woman that he had children by and which the civil law would regard as his wife, but totally silent as to his wife who was the mother of my classmate. My classmate's obituary mentions her, and kindly, using the Americanism "step" to describe her as her "stepmother", which is polite, but the second "wife" of a divorced person isn't anything, relationship wise, to a child of the "first" marriage at all.3 Children, of a later marriage of any kind are, of course, as they're related by blood, i.e., genetically. Of course, children born out of wedlock to an illicit partner, to which I am in no way comparing this situation other than to note it, are "half" siblings as well.4
It must be a later child of the second union that wrote the obituary, as it concluded with the funeral details, those being an apparently civil funeral, followed by an "Irish wake", the latter something not really understood by Americans. A real wake comes before, not after, the ceremony, and the body of the deceased is present. Indeed, the body is key to the wake, and the dead's family and friends do not allow the body to be left alone. Prayer for the dead is a feature of it, but there is also food and drink and even courting, which in part has to do with the fact that life goes on, but in part because in more natural societies people live much closer to death than they do in our false one.
Everywhere, real wakes have much diminished.5
But then, so has our understanding of, and appreciation of the metaphysical and the existential, and as most people do not dwell deeply on those topics, and the culture has drifted many of those who drift with it bear no fault for having done so.
There's no Irish wakes without prayer, the deceased, and a sense of the next world having stepped into this one. In our age, however, we expect this world and how we define it to step into the next one.
Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Te decet hymnus Deus in Sion,
et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem.
Exaudi orationem meam,
ad te omnis caro veniet.
Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.6
Footnotes:
1. In no small part because he was a well put together athletic man who drew hall monitor duty, but didn't seem to care for it much. Indeed, if you went by him in the hall, when he had it, he didn't bother to ask you where you were going.
2. I'll admit that this entry disregards the topic of Catholic annulment. Did they obtain one? No idea.
To add to that, do I know anything whatsoever about the circumstances of their "divorce" and what brought it about, including who brought it about. No I don't.
3. The etymology of the prefix "step" goes back to the 8th Century and denoted an orphan. It was later extended in Old English to connote a remarriage of a widow.
Some "step" parents, it might be noted, particularly in the case of an early death of an actual parent, or an abandonment by one of them, really step up to the plate and become effectively de facto parents.
The Pogues song Body of an American gives a good description of Irish wakes and how they can be. The movie Road To Perdition, however, gives a very good depiction of a traditional wake, complete with the body iced.
4. Again, as the fraud of civil divorce is so widely recognized as real in the Western World, I am in no way comparing the children of illicit affairs to the children of later contracted civil marriages.
5. I've been to a real wake once, for a deceased second cousin, and it was horrific. My father, who was 1/2 Irish, and 1/2 Westphalian by descent, but whose family did not retain any Irish customs, detested them.
6. Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,
and let light perpetual shine upon them.
Thou art worthy to praised, O God, in Zion,
and to thee shall prayer be offered in Jerusalem.
Hear my prayer,
for to thee shall all flesh come.
Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord,
and let light perpetual shine upon them.
Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.
