Wakes: Parties where the guest of honor doesn't get a say in who comes

Where we try explaining a wake to a six-year-old, look at family portraits with the dead and recount death's eternal march in my universe.

My wife and I felt like our 13-year-old was old enough to participate in the entirety of the festivities related to my father-in-law’s passing in June. We knew our six-year-old wasn’t going to last through the funeral as a matter of endurance, but we did wonder how she would experience the wake. She was sad when we explained that her Papa had died and that she wouldn’t see him anymore, but how was she going to deal with his body being in an open casket now that he had died.

Gentle in all things and far more equipped for this conversation than me, my wife handled the discussion of her coming to the wake. It went sort of like this:

Mom: We want you to go to the place where Papa is to see him one last time.

6: Heaven? (Because what six-year-old can process the literal and theoretical adeptly?)

Mom: No. There’s a place where Papa’s body is.

6: Okay. But I thought he died?

Mom: He did, but listen, we’re going to go and see him one last time. He’ll be in something called a casket. We can go up to him and look at him. Some people say a prayer. Other people just think good thoughts. And then, other people are going to come and do the same thing.

6: They say a prayer and then they leave?

Mom: No…some of them will stay for a little while.

6: In the same room as Papa? Isn’t he dead?

Mom (now looking at me): This is sort of a messed up tradition isn’t it?

Me: You’re doing great!

Seriously, how do you explain this to a six-year-old, especially when it doesn’t make a lick of sense to a 46-year-old?¹²

How did the idea of a wake come about? In what century did the idea of gathering a bunch of people in the same space with a dead body in the front of the room sound good? There have been advancements in the dead people industry. I mean, formaldehyde and air conditioning³ seem to be a winning combination in this regard.

Willis Havilland Carrier, or the reason I’m not sweating through my clothes while writing this.

My mother’s services in 1997 were open casket. Both she and my father-in-law had cancer, and their respective illnesses had done enough to their bodies to be the obvious uninvited guest. As an aside, my wife has requested closed casket. I’ve asked to be cremated. I guess there will be an urn, but it could be an ashtray for all I care. After all, it’s not like I’ll be able to complain to anyone.

The idea of viewing a dead body isn’t actually a human tradition. Anthropologists believe that it was learned from watching animals, which would look at a dead member of their pack or tribe as a means of accepting that they must go on without them. Okay. I can buy that.

But, then it gets sort of weird.

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It’s picture time!

During the Victorian age, the British — sophisticated lot that they are — would often take portraits with the dead family member. And I’m not just talking about the Italian-American⁴ tradition of taking photos at the calling hours and so that they can be developed and sent to the old country (try explaining that one to your six-year-old). We’re talking Olan Mills-level shit:

Talk about Awkward Family Photos. Courtesy of the BBC.

The parents, who are alive, are blurry because they moved slightly during the exposure. The daughter stayed completely still. Of course, she was dead.

This shit’s getting too creepy, even for me.

It was often babies and toddlers photographed since history tells us that it was tough making it past age 5. I’ll let the BBC do some of the work:

Photographs of loved ones taken after they died may seem morbid to modern sensibilities. But in Victorian England, they became a way of commemorating the dead and blunting the sharpness of grief.

In images that are both unsettling and strangely poignant, families pose with the dead, infants appear asleep, and consumptive young ladies elegantly recline, the disease not only taking their life but increasing their beauty.

Now that, my friends, is fucked up. I don’t care what era it is.

Funerals are a whole different animal; those have been going on for millennia. It’s the act of mourning and the invitation to stand around in a room with a dead body that still gets me. The wake (for our purposes, we’re going to use wake, calling hours and visitation interchangeably) is a relatively new practice in America. It gets its name because the Irish, generally credited with its development, would sit up all night awake as a means of honoring the dead person and guarding it from evil spirits.⁵ Apparently, this practice is still common in the far northwest of Scotland. That’s nice for them. I do hope that it is/was at least used as an excuse to consume large quantities of whiskey.

The practice of the formal wake came stateside with the Irish in the late 1800s and prevailed as a Catholic thing to do in America. (Prior to that, the Puritans would keep the body in the home for a period of time to allow family to travel but before the body would deteriorate greatly. Visitors to the home would wear gloves so that the dead person’s spirit wouldn’t enter their bodies. Remember, these were the same people who thought women that floated when dunked were witches.). There would be visitors to a home, the family would provide food and beverages, and sometimes have specific games they would play. Never one to miss an opportunity for a party, the Italians got in on the act quickly and baked ziti quickly became the official food of the post-funeral luncheon™.

(My grandmother used to call the large room in her house the parlor. It didn’t click until many years in the future that this room, the large space with ornate furniture and a piano that we only ever used on holidays was where they would host family viewings of dead relatives.)

Naturally, Americans did a very American thing: they industrialized death. I mean, you can’t let the immigrants have all the fun when there is money to be made⁶. The funeral business sprung to life around the turn of the century. U.S. Census data shows that there were about 9,900 people in 1890 that identified themselves as undertakers. In 10 years, that number increased to more than 16,000. Sources place the number of funeral homes in the United States at around 20,000 and the National Funeral Directors Association puts its membership at around the same number.

Wakes, at least in this area, used to run 2-4 p.m. then 7-9 p.m., I guess to get the housewives and people after work. At some point, it became 4-7 p.m., which is what we had for my father-in-law. The funeral home tried convincing my MIL to drop an hour and go 5-7 p.m., but she heard none of it…until it was 6:45 p.m. and we were just sitting around staring at a dead body at the front of the room.

I mean, it could be worse. We could have used those last 15 minutes for the last set of family photos.

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On a semi-related note…

Death continued its march through my universe this week. My wife and I have a strange series of coincidental mutual relationships. In this case, her Italian uncle⁷ died. I knew his sons before ever meeting my wife, as we attended the same high school.

The family opted for the express lane for services: 9 a.m. wake, 11 a.m. funeral, followed by burial, the obligatory luncheon and them getting out of town.

(I’m not going to say it wasn’t unexpected. He had a debilitating series of strokes five years ago and was given a 2% change of survival. He spent the remainder of his life in a skilled nursing facility, before it was discovered that a series of tumors spread throughout his body. My mother-in-law was in the room visiting when he died. If you’re keeping score, that’s two in five weeks for her.)

For a variety of irrelevant reasons, my plan was to attend the funeral and leave; my wife did a reading, so she was planning on making a day of it with her mother and sister. On Friday night, my 13-year-old daughter asked if she could come, and tagged along with me on Saturday morning.

As we were driving, I turned down the radio and posed a question to her:

Me: I have a question. It’s purely curiosity and there’s no judgment here,⁸ but why did you decide you wanted to go this morning?

13: (pause) Well…I haven’t seen Uncle Mike in a while.⁹ And, I knew he was important to Grandma.

And that last part made the most sense of all.

When my father-in-law died, my wife and her sister walked behind my mother-in-law. My brother-in-law and I walked behind them. My oldest? She walked next to her grandmother and sat next to her during the services. Yesterday was a replay of the same. And, after the funeral, she informed me that she was going to stay for everything else.

We spent last week’s episode talking about anticipatory grief, namely hers. I think the grief continues and manifested itself once more in her trying to protect her grandmother during an otherwise vulnerable moment.

It was (possibly) the most grown-up thing I’ve ever seen her do.

Final Thoughts on Finality

“Mind you, I don’t have anything against the Millennial-device-of-choice these days to impoverish us all: the destination wedding.  So long as the destination is no further away than an hour-and-a-half by car, as prescribed by the wisest man of our time, Larry David.  Though it does have me thinking about counterprogramming the young’uns with my own destination funeral, forcing them to fly halfway around the world to prove they’re serious about honoring my memory. When I ran the idea by my fishing compagno, The Cool Refresher, who has a few years on me and is presumably closer to his own demise than I am (fingers crossed), C.R.  said, ‘I’m in! I would like my ashes scattered in one of the pirate’s coves in Somalia. That will be a memorable funeral.’

— Matt Labash

1. I always thought an open bar would work for a wake, but that’s apparently prohibited by New York, and most other, states. Such prudes.

2. She came to the wake and stayed about 30 minutes before leaving with my father and stepmother.

3. I staunchly believe that Willis Havilland Carrier is the greatest American.

4. I remember a wake for a relative where, at the end, one of the aunts tried to gather the nieces and nephews (of which I was one) around the casket for a photo. I left and went for a long walk to the bathroom.

5. McCorristine, Shane (2017). Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and Its Timings. Springer. pp. 4–7.

6. See also White People Taco Night.

7. A non-related person close enough to be called uncle/aunt, for the uninitiated

8. Have you had a conversation with a 13-year-old girl recently? Sometimes a simple question requires a lengthy prequalification in order to not appear as if you’re on attack or prying too much. It’s great. Everyone should have at least one nonthreatening interaction per month with a 13-year-old girl, by law.

9. True story, though she would have been 5 or 6 the last time she would have seen him.