Nine Rules to Conquer Death by Kevin Toolis

Author:Kevin Toolis [Toolis, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786079848
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2020-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

Rule Five: Learning how to die is the same as learning how to live.

Rule Five

So what does that mean? Learning to die, learning to live?

Well the basic idea, once you’ve got over that first confrontation with a corpse, is just to start to learn to relax, lean into your mortality as they say, and get on with a few how-to-die courses. Which really are the same thing as how-to-live courses.

And recognise that dying is nothing special.

That does not mean you have to wear black, sleep in your coffin or visit graveyards every week. What it really means it that you start to learn to take the scariness out of death and don’t feel so awkward around the dying or being mortal yourself given that you’ve no other options.

Remember Rule Three – how pretending to be immortal is a very bad idea?

But how can you do that? The death/life training bit? The not so scared bit?

Well you could begin with an Irish Wake.

When I was seven my mother took me to my first wake on the island for my first how-to-die lesson. The wake was in a small whitewashed cottage that was crammed with old ladies in black scarves and men wearing flat caps holding tobacco pipes and puffing away.

I was a grumpy child, bewildered by the strangeness of everything and the over-welcoming smiles of the adults around me. I slunk close behind my mother, holding her skirt, as she worked her way down the line of mourners in the small space surrounding the long box that was the coffin but which was too high for me to see into.

Ritually my mother shook the hands of what must have been the dead man’s close family and repeated the same phrase: ‘Sorry for your trouble.’

The Irish love children at funerals so even by my mother’s side I was patted on the head, my cheeks squeezed and my looks complimented upon.

‘A fine-looking gasúr [boy].’

I shrank away from these intruding strangers, even closer to my mother.

When we got to the head of the coffin, laid out on the kitchen table, my mother helped lift me up so I could peer over the side. I was too small to see by myself. Inside there was an old man with unnaturally yellow skin and sunken cheeks with dry barbed grey nostril hairs sticking out of his nose. He was lying on his back dressed in a brown suit and his yellow fingers, tobacco smoke stained, were clasped together and a set of grey rosary beads wrapped between them. I knew straight away that he was not alive. He was too still. I jerked away in revulsion back against my mother but she did not let me go.

On the other side of the coffin sitting down looking at us was a line of old ladies, eyes staring, smiling and grinning; it is a common Irish superstition that the prayers of a child, a sexual innocent, will rise quicker to Heaven for the benefit of the soul of the departed.

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