Here is a tale of two funerals, one English, one Maori. The first was the burial of my father’s brother Michael, an Irish engineer who spent his working life in London, married an English wife, and had an English son who went to a minor public school and became a well-known architect.
Michael survived his wife, but gradually succumbed to the ravages of age, and died in hospital. He was buried from a church in Kensington. Apart from the priest there were six mourners in the church, and four who followed the hearse to the grave. It was all businesslike and quite desolating, to think that this good man had lived his life on the Other Island, and between his own and his wife’s and his son’s friends and colleagues, only six people turned up to say goodbye. In that bustling city, the event was so lonely that his son thought seriously about going to his office for an afternoon’s work when the obsequies were complete.
Morgan was different. He was a Maori who had gone to work in Brisbane, Australia, and at the age of 37 was run down by a truck and killed instantly. They brought his body back for the funeral in Bluff, at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. He was a Catholic, so there was a funeral Mass; and he was a Maori, so it was held in the Bluff Marae or community meeting house. This is a specially beautiful Marae, ablaze with light and colour, and dominated by ten gigantic figures, nine of them women, representing the founders of the tribe in New Zealand. The rich carpet made shoes an unnecessary encumbrance – it was either bare feet or stockings.
The coffin lay on the ground near the table which served as an altar. It had been there for two days and nights, always attended by some of the clan. When it was closed, they covered it with an intricately woven feather cloak, and with flowers. There was a mattress beside it, as a seat for the twenty or thirty relatives who form what is called the Skin of Death. From grandparents to grandchildren they squatted round the remains of Morgan, and for the space of the funeral they are seen as identified with him, dead to the world but chatting easily among themselves, absorbed in his history and life. He had been much loved but unsettled: he had a daughter, now eighteen, by one lover, and a baby son by another; both were there to mourn him.
This gathering of all his relatives was the most striking presence in the room. The other great presence was 70-year-old Sir Tipene O’Regan, who on his mother’s side has roots in Clonakilty, Co. Cork, and is related also to the dead man. He is the leader (for life, like the Pope) of the largest tribe in the South Island, 48,000 Maoris who respect his authority in an affectionate way. At his feet the little children played quietly on the carpet. When he rose to speak the assembly was immediately silent. It was he who had seen to the design and building of this lovely Marae, which runs services for pre-school children, for under-achievers, for gifted children, and for illiterate adults. He has been a highly successful politician for Maori causes, and he worked the room effectively like any politician.
As we walked out into the sunlight after the Mass I was startled by a scream. It was the signal for a haka, which accompanied the pall-bearers to the gate of the Marae. Four fierce-looking men, naked to the waist, carrying spears and other weapons, danced, shouted and gestured in front of the coffin. One rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue in the contortion familiar from the All Blacks’ haka. Another, plump, bald, and fiftyish, still moved with a ballet-dancer’s lightness of foot. When the hearse reached the cemetery, the haka resumed until the coffin was at the grave. The words they shout are poetic, taken from old verses and sea-shanties, expressing concerted effort and strenuous, rhythmical exercise together, with a heave-ho, as for oars or lifting logs. On this occasion it was a show of solidarity with their dead friend.
The scene around the grave was lively, with people pushing right up to the open pit. One woman would strike up a song (in Maori), and all would join in. When the boards were removed and the coffin was lowered, there was an outburst of sobbing, especially from the children, who were learning about the pain of death in a secure and love-filled setting. The wreaths of flowers which had covered the coffin were taken apart, and each mourner was given a blossom, which we kissed and dropped onto the coffin. People were in no hurry to move away from the sunny grave. When they did, it was to a banquet in the Marae. At the end of it, Tipene and two of the elders made speeches, and obeyed the tradition that you sing a song at the end of your speech.
When I compare this lovely, slow-moving, spontaneous goodbye with the desolate ritual in the Kensington church, I realise how much the West has lost in its sense of community and kinship. The Bluff Marae showed Maori culture at its best: here were people who realise that some things take time, and mourning is one of them. Death, with all its horror and grief, has to be tasted, and the support of those we love, or who are kith and kin to us, helps us to endure the loss.
Thank God, that sense is still strong in Ireland. Several friends in Bluff remarked to me on the similarities between their obsequies and the old Irish wake. Both rituals face the reality of death without hurrying away from it, they offer support to the bereaved, and help them to pray with Job: The Lord has given life, the Lord has taken it away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.