Transcript
Speaker: behind after the funeral or all that, your life will resume.
Speaker: So wakes, keening, all of these arts really are to bring you through that death process, the realisation of kind of therapeutic.
Speaker: PIANO PLAYS
Speaker: Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host, Jennifer Muldeny, a.k.a.
Speaker: The Glam Reaper.
Speaker: And on today's episode, I'm very excited because I am joined by a fellow Irishman, although kind of Scotsman, we'll get into it, but it is the amazing author, filmmaker and recent band member, which we'll get into also,
Speaker: Kevin Toulis.
Speaker: Kevin, nice to meet you.
Speaker: Hi, Jennifer.
Speaker: Nice to meet you too across the ocean.
Speaker: I am literally in Ackill Island.
Speaker: So the only thing between us is just 3000 miles of water.
Speaker: Whim.
Speaker: Just a little bath, just a little bit of water.
Speaker: So you are actually an Ackle, amazing.
Speaker: But you were born in Scotland.
Speaker: I love the Scottish.
Speaker: I actually just got to Scotland at the start of this year doing a celebration of life, which was incredible.
Speaker: Scotland, oh, it's just so beautiful.
Speaker: But you're Irish.
Speaker: You recognise yourself as being Irish, is it?
Speaker: Well, both my parents are Ackle Islanders and we spend every summer here and we have a family house.
Speaker: We're actually even so old on the island that we were here when the English soldiers came in 1834 to name the place.
Speaker: So some of the local townland is named after our family.
Speaker: So we're very kind of Irish.
Speaker: Strangely, sometimes when I speak to the Irish Irish, because I grew up in this Ackle Island tradition, my Irishness is kind of older than them.
Speaker: I've been on the bog years.
Speaker: played weight games we could talk about that yeah kind of mock the dead uh saved hay basically played the full role of being a small irish peasant child from the ages of six onwards and then obviously i lived away in edinburgh too but i'm back living on the island now back in the ancestral village
Speaker: Okay, and so you are back, you're permanently back living there because I know there was London then for a bit, I believe.
Speaker: And so just for everyone who's not Irish and listening to this, so it will be interesting and I'm sure we'll touch on it at certain points.
Speaker: So I'm from Dublin, Ireland.
Speaker: which is the capital of Ireland, even though there's some arguments that Corde likes to claim that.
Speaker: But anyway, and a lot of people don't know or they'll ask me sort of, Jen, you don't sound like everybody else from Ireland.
Speaker: And I just recently this weekend explained to somebody that mostly people from Dublin sound a little bit more like English people because...
Speaker: They were more English takeover in Dublin.
Speaker: We were kind of where where they they had us most.
Speaker: So there's less people who speak Irish Gaelic Gaelic in Dublin than there are when you go West, when you go to Galway, Mayo, stuff like that.
Speaker: And I thankfully grew up going to Gaeltox, which is Irish school.
Speaker: And so I do still have my Irish language.
Speaker: Thank God.
Speaker: I love that actually when I'm able to talk to Irish people here in New York about other people in the Irish language.
Speaker: But you're from an island that's off Ireland.
Speaker: So you're actually, yeah, you're closest to me here in New York, really.
Speaker: Yeah, we're 100 metres from the ocean.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In terms of Ackal Irish, there is a kind of particular dialect here.
Speaker: Now, I'm terrible at languages, so I can't speak Irish.
Speaker: But okay.
Speaker: It's a very kind of individual dialect, which is very influenced by Ulster Irish.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: They don't say Manaw, they say Imra.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They don't say Galaher, they say Galaher.
Speaker: Yes, the accents.
Speaker: It's been very interesting actually being over here and hearing Donegal Irish, Cork Irish and just the different the different twangs.
Speaker: But we won't get into the Irish language and because we don't have off day, even though maybe we'll have to bring you back again for that.
Speaker: But Kevin, one of the main reasons we connected is you wrote a book many years ago.
Speaker: It's probably it's not a decade.
Speaker: I don't think yet, but about the Irish way.
Speaker: Now, what we do over here with Muldowny Memorials, I like to say it's almost like the wake 2.0.
Speaker: So it's bringing back in food, drinks, that kind of joyful memory, you know, sharing of food and drinks, whether the body's present or whether it's cremated remains or however,
Speaker: And the person is present, bringing that back into what a funeral kind of became.
Speaker: It became a little bit cliche, a bit cookie cutter.
Speaker: And so that's, you know, yeah, I was raised and that was the interesting thing reading your book is it was slightly different to my upbringing in Ireland.
Speaker: Probably because I'm from Dublin and Dublin will be like New York versus Ohio, I guess, you know, in terms of just the way Dublin became a lot more commercialized really quick and stuff.
Speaker: So like the removals left Dublin funerals a lot quicker than it has down the country yet.
Speaker: But I still did wake, wake, do the wakes with the body physically being in the room, open casket, you know, sharing food and drink around the body.
Speaker: So tell us a little bit about the book, if you don't mind, for people who don't know about it and who are going to go out and get it hopefully after this.
Speaker: So the title of the book is My Father's Wake, How the Irish Teach Us to Live, Love and Die.
Speaker: And really it's both a personal memoir, but it's a sort of guidebook about what the wake means, why do people do it.
Speaker: And I suppose it's principally grounded in my own father Sonny's death.
Speaker: On the island.
Speaker: Now Sonny had a. He had a pretty hard death.
Speaker: In the sense he had pancreatic cancer.
Speaker: But he had a great death.
Speaker: In terms of like having an Irish wake.
Speaker: Meaning he really had the.
Speaker: You might call the sort of full bells and whistles job.
Speaker: He even had like a pre-wake.
Speaker: Where a lot of people came to see him.
Speaker: Knowing that he was dying.
Speaker: And they came to say goodbye.
Speaker: And so there was actually a line of people like it was almost like a wedding house to be a line of people in the morning.
Speaker: Sometimes he was tired, didn't want to see them.
Speaker: Other times they came to say goodbye and there was no kind of shame in it.
Speaker: There's an awful lot of openness.
Speaker: And really, it sort of reflects the fact that there's many great things about Ireland.
Speaker: But one of the really great things is the openness around death so that people aren't afraid to say, oh, I kind of hear you're dying.
Speaker: I bumped into an old man the other day and he said, oh, did you hear, Kevin?
Speaker: I've got cancer of the spleen and it spread to the bowel and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: But I'm feeling great.
Speaker: And that was the opening conversation.
Speaker: Other thing, essentially, of course, is that when people do die, there's a week, they often like they either die at home or they die in hospital.
Speaker: But the person is taken home.
Speaker: Lots of neighbors come around.
Speaker: The body's there.
Speaker: Death is a kind of like commonplace.
Speaker: So open social recognition.
Speaker: With my own father, I remember we were in the room, my aunt was there and she said, oh, come quick, he's dying, he's dying.
Speaker: And I went into this room, tiny wee room, and there were 10 mainly women in it.
Speaker: Some of them strangers, some of the people I'd never met before.
Speaker: I'm thinking, what the hell are you here for?
Speaker: And anyway, they broke out in the rosary.
Speaker: You know, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Speaker: Bless thou thou, and bless the fruit of thy one.
Speaker: And Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for sinners now.
Speaker: And the noise, the chorus grew louder and louder and louder.
Speaker: And they thought he was actually dying at that moment.
Speaker: And what I recognised then, I suppose I recognised it as a writer and a responsibility, they were like cradling this man into death.
Speaker: It was like a kind of lullaby, like you'd, the way that you might hold a child and you'd sing a song.
Speaker: So they were kind of holding this other human being who was doing that incredibly ordinary thing of dying.
Speaker: And it was an act of profound love and empathy.
Speaker: Because, of course, the first best hope of life is that you will be born into a family and people who will love you.
Speaker: And the last best hope of life is that you will die within a community who will love you too, who will love you to death, literally.
Speaker: But then, obviously, do the right thing by you, you know, respect your body, give you a kind of proper funeral, lay you to rest.
Speaker: And one of the reasons for that is...
Speaker: These are really, really old human beliefs.
Speaker: These are far before any organized religion.
Speaker: We feel we've got a kind of duty to the dead to lay them to rest, partly because our ancestors were a bit scared that if you didn't do that, they'd come out of the grave, out of the spirit world, and they'd come and haunt you forever.
Speaker: So we have to do the right things by the dead, regardless of how tragic it is, and lay them to rest.
Speaker: And that's one of the things why I think we find murder so abhorrent, or mass grave.
Speaker: Because obviously murderers always hide their victims.
Speaker: They bury them without a Christian burial and unmarked graves.
Speaker: They lie and cover up atrocities and war.
Speaker: And we're kind of disrespecting the humanity of others.
Speaker: So these are really profound psychological beliefs that underpin all human society and the Irish are just really growing at.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting because one of the things that I'm famous or not famous or whatever for, but I've said often is I think the Irish are, I actually don't think we're good at death.
Speaker: I think we're good at funeral.
Speaker: So, because in my experience,
Speaker: We are such a superstitious country.
Speaker: So like if you said to somebody, like I've often said to my mum, oh, mum, that necklace is lovely or those earrings are gorgeous.
Speaker: And she'd start to say, oh, well, you can have them, you know, when I, you know, you're an embers on them.
Speaker: You know, I'd immediately or my reaction should immediately be, oh, don't don't even talk about it.
Speaker: So it's we're good at it in certain respects, I feel.
Speaker: But in other respects, we're so superstitious, kind of touching on what you said about how if it's done disrespectfully, then there's a chance that the Banshees could have come back and get us.
Speaker: And you touched a bit there as well on the women involved.
Speaker: You know, and that's obviously a famous like the Keening Woman, the band Queen to, you know, coming in and the prayer, even though it's the prayer, you know, which is obviously specific to certain people.
Speaker: There is it's more of the melody and the lullaby.
Speaker: And yeah, it's.
Speaker: It's fascinating.
Speaker: There was an ad years ago.
Speaker: It just reminded me there.
Speaker: I think it was PlayStation or something.
Speaker: And it was an absolutely brilliant ad.
Speaker: I must dig it up somewhere.
Speaker: Where it basically showed us kind of scuttling through life and how we're born.
Speaker: And it kind of took us off as a rocket, like a human rocket.
Speaker: And how it brought us then back to how it's full circle.
Speaker: You know, we come, I've often said it, we kind of are born into this world naked with no shame, no guilt, you know, nothing.
Speaker: And then we go back.
Speaker: basically naked.
Speaker: I mean, you can put clothes on us, but it's not going to do much good.
Speaker: It's just, yeah, it's such a fascinating idea.
Speaker: And I do think the Irish are incredible.
Speaker: We did an interview with, I'm not sure if you know of him, Frank Crummey, the legendary Frank Crummey, who is
Speaker: Getting on, I saw Moni just last month, thankfully, for his 86th birthday.
Speaker: He's an incredible man and legend in Ireland.
Speaker: But I remember him talking about the Irish wakes and how his kids, you know, you'd get a bag of chips and the good china might come out as well when somebody died and the good food would come out.
Speaker: And, you know, if you dropped it in on top of the corpse, you went in and got it.
Speaker: There was just a familiarity with the corpse, which I think is really beautiful.
Speaker: And which is sad to see that that's gone.
Speaker: I do think I think being forced to see dead bodies isn't not isn't great either.
Speaker: I do think so.
Speaker: I'm definitely I hear I absolutely hear everything you're saying and I think it should be more normalized.
Speaker: I think children.
Speaker: It should be a thing.
Speaker: And, you know, just recently my niece and nephew lost their great grandmother.
Speaker: And, you know, then all of a sudden they were terrified that other people were going to go as well.
Speaker: But I do think you have to start introducing that early to children for them to start getting understanding and not be scared and not in a scary situation.
Speaker: And I know the former president of the NAFD in the UK, John, he's doing a brilliant job of trying to bring bereavement to schools where it should be taught like sex education and all.
Speaker: Like fundamentals.
Speaker: Most likely is everybody going to have sex in their life and is everybody going to die?
Speaker: Those are the two.
Speaker: Never mind the taxes, actually, because I don't think everybody pays taxes, let's be honest.
Speaker: So that's nearly outdated.
Speaker: But what I do find interesting is that I do think there should be a choice.
Speaker: You know, I sound very millennial, I guess, when I'm saying this, but...
Speaker: For example, for me, I've seen obviously hundreds of dead bodies.
Speaker: I do this for a living.
Speaker: But when it comes to my own people, my own and I've no problem seeing them.
Speaker: But when it comes to my own people, I do have preferences.
Speaker: Like, unfortunately, one of my friends passed away and unfortunately he drowned.
Speaker: and seeing him unfortunately I wish I could reverse time it was exactly as you said it was a very Irish thing I was just brought into the room because that was the natural thing you did and I just wish I could have had that choice and and unfortunately then I was there and you know you can't take it away but now that's the face that I see instead of his lovely and when somebody drowns it's
Speaker: It's tough on the body and depending on how the person has passed away and the quality of embalming, it can definitely make the body look.
Speaker: And equally here in America, I've obviously done some Irish funerals and then I've attended some funerals that I've had nothing to do with.
Speaker: And there is, which isn't a part of old Ireland, but embalming is a huge new thing, right?
Speaker: New commercialization of death.
Speaker: And I do feel like embalming and I love Glyn Tallon, who's an incredible embalmer in Ireland.
Speaker: His work is brilliant.
Speaker: But there's some people who are not so great at it.
Speaker: And you see these young, beautiful girls who died by suicide or, you know, just died tragically young.
Speaker: And they're done up like a 90-year-old woman.
Speaker: And you're like, what?
Speaker: This wasn't, this isn't my friend.
Speaker: So I do understand the need to hang on to the memories of the person laughing.
Speaker: But at the same time, there needs to be this comfortability with death.
Speaker: So it's a tough one, Kevin.
Speaker: You either adopt something like a kind of closed English system.
Speaker: Like I remember Zanty Marge in England.
Speaker: She died.
Speaker: There was this funeral that took place eight weeks later.
Speaker: I wouldn't even call it a funeral, I'd call it like a memorial service.
Speaker: You know, they arrived in the big Mercedes, West London crematorium, wheeled the rent in a box.
Speaker: You know, the Church of England for hire our vicar, who of course had never met her and told us that, but then told us she was very nice.
Speaker: And then we had an English week in the golf club afterwards.
Speaker: And she was like a kind of big person.
Speaker: She'd been a human resource officer in what became the University of London.
Speaker: If I was in Dublin, there would have been like 800 people that were human.
Speaker: There was like 30.
Speaker: They were all old.
Speaker: Everyone had been drawing their pension for about like a decade.
Speaker: She was 82.
Speaker: And it was a really small little squimp to the end of her life.
Speaker: I'm not sure how therapeutic it was.
Speaker: She was actually in a kind of racially mixed marriage, and that wasn't referred to at all.
Speaker: It's just like who, you know, she was, you know, kind of product in the machine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And obviously there's no viewing of the body.
Speaker: And particularly in England, I'd be quite critical and other undertakers would be critical too.
Speaker: You know, it's actually very difficult to get buried very quickly.
Speaker: I mean, by quickly, I mean four to six weeks.
Speaker: And that is tricky, you know.
Speaker: I think it's tricky for a lot of people in terms of their grief.
Speaker: It's tricky in terms of family gathering.
Speaker: It's tricky in terms of obviously seeing the dead body, if you want to see the dead body.
Speaker: I mean, you can, but it's amazing that in Dublin, you can still get buried in three days.
Speaker: And I think you'd struggle in the UK to get buried within three weeks anywhere or cremated.
Speaker: You'd be doing really, really well.
Speaker: So Dublin is the city of million people and the Vikings were there and, you know,
Speaker: The Romans never got there, but it's a pretty old city.
Speaker: It's not like... It didn't just arrive yesterday.
Speaker: It's been burying a lot of people in Dublin for a long time.
Speaker: Yeah, and the two main families that do the funerals there are even more in competition than ever.
Speaker: I think the two of them have opened up two new facilities in the same neighbourhood.
Speaker: So whenever I go home, I laugh.
Speaker: I'm like, oh, the funeral wars, family wars are still going on.
Speaker: Yeah, so... Yeah, listen, it's so... The week...
Speaker: the Irish wake is so interesting and it's got so much validity to even, you know, applying it to today.
Speaker: And I think, well, for me, obviously, because it's what I do for a living, but for me, I think it's bringing back or it's modernizing the aspects that I really think are important.
Speaker: And when I'm working with a family, it's,
Speaker: You know, food and drink, it sounds, it almost sounds like commercializing it again.
Speaker: And yes, you know, you're getting caterers, you're doing all this biz.
Speaker: But at the same time, it's like having the service and it being a personalized service, even if the person is Catholic or Jewish or whoever they are, but having it really, truly personalized service.
Speaker: And then just allowing people over food and drink to share memories rather than it's just, boop, it's over and let's move on and now back to reality.
Speaker: And even I'm a celebrant now, which my grandmother probably be rolling in her grave because I was raised Catholic, as most Irish people were.
Speaker: And but now I'm a celebrant.
Speaker: And so I help people of all different faiths.
Speaker: And it doesn't take away from my Catholic faith.
Speaker: It's just that I help people personalize the service.
Speaker: And exactly like what you said about the priest, which is a big thing.
Speaker: issue people have is that the priest will either doesn't know the person but acts like they do or to get the name wrong or if I've heard you know that I've heard it a million times and so for me it's so important to make sure I get everybody's names right as to who's who and equally I'm very the family will approve every word I say before I get up there and say it there's no ad-libbing because it's such a dangerous time to ad-lib I think because I could think oh I've spent the last two days with this family I know what their humour is but
Speaker: I'm going to crack this joke now.
Speaker: And it could fall absolutely flat.
Speaker: Like this isn't a comedy show.
Speaker: You know, it's this person's it's it's about them.
Speaker: But tell us, Kevin, because we could talk all day.
Speaker: You just recently did, which I'm shocked that I found out after the fact I would have absolutely gone home for it.
Speaker: And you just did a Keening Festival in Ireland.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, one of the lost arts of the wake is Keening.
Speaker: And again, it's a hugely old rite.
Speaker: It's like the oldest music of womankind.
Speaker: The ancient Egyptians did it.
Speaker: The Trojans did it.
Speaker: If you read the Iliad, which is written by Homer in 750 BC, when they eventually take the Trojan prince Hector's body back to Troy, and it's like the end game, quite soon the city's going to fall.
Speaker: All the Trojan women rush out into the street and they keen and then eventually they sort of take them home and they kind of wash them up.
Speaker: And Homer says, and then we have the minstrels of the dirge.
Speaker: And are these keening women?
Speaker: So you've had that.
Speaker: In Roman London as well, you would have keening women.
Speaker: In Ghana today, you can still hire keeners.
Speaker: And I would love to reintroduce, you know, hire professional keeners.
Speaker: And we might think, oh, God, that sounds so fake and insincere.
Speaker: But it's no more insincere than, in a sense, you know, hiring the funeral, the hearse driver.
Speaker: You hire people, you know, you hire undertakers.
Speaker: Paul Bearers, Grave Towers.
Speaker: Keening brings on a kind of catharsis of emotion.
Speaker: People often used it to sort of elevate the status of the deceased, show how sad everyone was, how important they were.
Speaker: But also it is a way of sort of bringing on emotion.
Speaker: Our ancestors did it for a really good reason, is that you get this intense burst of emotion, but you kind of move through the grieving process quite quickly.
Speaker: And really that's also part of the Irish wake, which is so therapeutic, is people come together and they kind of shake your hand.
Speaker: You know, sometimes if you're one of the principal mourners, you'll shake 400 people's hands.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But all the time they're saying, it's a cliche, sorry for your trouble.
Speaker: They're also kind of squeezing your hand a little bit.
Speaker: And then they're psychologically saying, they're dead.
Speaker: I know they're dead.
Speaker: Do you know they're dead?
Speaker: They're dead.
Speaker: They're dead.
Speaker: And of course, John Didion does this at the Year of Magical Thinking where the husband dies and she has to keep the shoes in the bottom of the bedroom because in case he comes back, it's quite easy to sort of think that behind after the funeral, that your life will resume.
Speaker: So wakes, keening, all of these arts really are to bring you through that death process, the realization of kind of therapeutic.
Speaker: So we had this keening festival to kind of celebrate it all.
Speaker: We had walks and talks.
Speaker: And there's a lot about, there's another side to the wake.
Speaker: This comes out in Bardic Poetry.
Speaker: where we all gathered together around the dead body to bring it through this solar cycle.
Speaker: But one of the deep, deep beliefs was that it was a kind of dodgy place, that once you have opened this doorway for the soul to depart into the underworld, you're pretty fearful about what was coming back through that doorway.
Speaker: And that is what people do, is when you wake through the night, you're there to basically man the gate of chaos against Hades' invading Horde.
Speaker: until the glorious life-giving sun rises in victory again.
Speaker: Immortal soldiers stalwart, forever gathering themselves, dying in each other's lives and living on in each other's death at every wake ever since.
Speaker: That's from a Bardic poem I've written called If I Could Sing, but basically that's what all those old men sipping bottles of Guinness at three o'clock in the morning on a hard seat are doing in some small Irish island.
Speaker: They're guarding the natural world against the invasion of spirits.
Speaker: They're our last mortal defence.
Speaker: And of course it's all the idea that the supernatural and the natural are all kind of mingled up together and that you have to lay this person to rest so that these horrible supernatural forces don't kind of burst in
Speaker: When you think about it, it's a really common grief reaction for the bereaved to see they're dead for three months, six months.
Speaker: Really, they come in their dreams.
Speaker: And of course, if you were in, you know, in the past, you said, well, that's them.
Speaker: That's their spirit like appearing.
Speaker: And, you know, there's often it's this happens in the Odyssey.
Speaker: You say, well, you haven't really buried me.
Speaker: You know, you better come back and give me, you know, put me to rest.
Speaker: You promised.
Speaker: And so it's this idea that this vision, this dream that you have is this work, you know,
Speaker: Voices from the other world.
Speaker: So we're all gathered there.
Speaker: We've got our shoulders to the door making sure that Hades invading Horsach are bursting through.
Speaker: And hopefully that Auntie Maudie is soon on her way safely.
Speaker: There's also tradition in Akil Island to what they call the shtickers.
Speaker: And the guys who actually spend all night sitting up, they in the morning, they get a decent Irish fry, bacon and sausages before being sent on their way.
Speaker: That sounds about right.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Yeah, it's so funny how so much in Ireland revolves around food and drink as a motivator or as a keep the peace.
Speaker: So the festival, was it a success?
Speaker: Will it happen again, do you think?
Speaker: It'll happen next year.
Speaker: Yeah, it was a tremendous success.
Speaker: We had amazing sort of publicity.
Speaker: We had lots of people come from the UK, some from Germany.
Speaker: What it was is people kind of recognised that the Irish Wake, Keening, that these are really almost like the centre and core of Irish culture and that it was the right thing to kind of honour them.
Speaker: And it was surprising, really, that it hadn't been done before.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And also we're very keen on, as I say, reviving Keening.
Speaker: There was a great Shanos singer there called Katrina Nohanawine whose own grandmother taught her Keening in the 1960s in Konamara.
Speaker: My own great-grandmother was a Keener in Echel.
Speaker: And even with Sonny's death, that we didn't do kind of formal Keenan, but we did something really, really similar to Keenan.
Speaker: When one of my aunts would come, forced come to see her brother, who was my father, this interesting about Wakes is that you begin to realise is that the man I knew is my father.
Speaker: Other people used their brother or their workmate or their colleague.
Speaker: They all did these different aspects.
Speaker: But anyway, when my aunts would turn up to look at their dead brother, there was this whole wave of kind of keenan that went through the room with all the women and went through me too.
Speaker: And there was a wave of kind of catharsis of emotion that was bringing out this grief.
Speaker: And that was a good thing.
Speaker: There was no shame in that story.
Speaker: And if you can't cry when someone that you've loved has died, then...
Speaker: when else yeah absolutely absolutely yeah no it's very very interesting and when is the festival when will it be next year it's uh in may of next year may it'll be may the 17th to the 18th it's in mulrani beautiful part of the world
Speaker: We don't want to sort of turn it into some sort of academic, you know, here we are and such and such.
Speaker: It's a participatory.
Speaker: One of the most amazing aspects of the festival was a kind of sharing.
Speaker: For instance, there was a palliative care nurse there.
Speaker: And she was talking about her feeling slightly embarrassed when one of the patients was dying at home and she was in and they wanted to sing.
Speaker: They wanted to sing.
Speaker: And so they all began to sing.
Speaker: And then she began in the kind of, we're in this chapel.
Speaker: And then we said, well, what was the song?
Speaker: And so she began to sing the song and everyone else sang the song too.
Speaker: And it was very moving.
Speaker: It's important.
Speaker: The festival's not a kind of lecture of experts.
Speaker: It's there to gather in, to share, to, in some ways, to revive these lost arts of the week.
Speaker: So that little bit of poetry is from a bardic poem that I've
Speaker: I've written about the island called If I Could Sing.
Speaker: I've given another little verse.
Speaker: If you could hear my soul, you too would listen in rapture to the Amra Kintia, keening women, crying out, heart struck still for Hector and his children, sundered in the same grieving that the living and the dead must conmingle in the sickening, the dying and the grave.
