Tradition / Reflection
Oíche Shamhna: The Night We Make Room for the Dead
I’ve been seeing dead bodies since I was about three years old. That might sound startling to some people. To me, it means I grew up going to wakes.
Somebody died. They were brought home, and we went to their house. The person lay in their coffin while neighbours gathered, relatives arrived and children wandered between rooms. Someone put the kettle on. Someone remembered something, and laughter rose unexpectedly through the grief. There were tears too, and silences nobody needed to fill.
It was ordinary, in the deepest sense of that word. Something we understood how to do together. Something we still do.
I think about that at Halloween, when the evenings close in and darkness arrives before we’re quite ready for it. Beneath the costumes and fireworks, there is an older story about the changing season and our place within it.
Oíche Shamhna - pronounced roughly “EE-ha HOW-nuh”, with “HOW” rhyming with “cow”. And if you’re wondering how those letters make those sounds, it’s Irish, for God’s sake. We like to keep you guessing.
The eve of Samhain, the beginning of winter. The harvest gathered, people coming together, the colder months ahead. Early Irish stories placed encounters with the Otherworld at this turning of the year, when familiar ground could become strange and the hills might open to reveal another life within them.
We often describe it now as the night when the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. It is a beautiful image, though the history is less tidy than we sometimes suggest. Much of what we know comes through later stories and customs; we cannot confidently reconstruct everything people believed around an ancient Samhain fire.
In Irish folklore, though, we find the expectation that the dead might come home. A door left unlocked, a place set at the table. Alongside the fear of dangerous spirits was the possibility of someone familiar returning to a familiar room.
It is that place at the table that stays with me. The small domestic kindness of having something ready. Someone remembering, even in their absence, that they belonged.
Christian remembrance became woven through the season too. All Hallows’ Eve gave Halloween its English name, followed by All Saints’ Day on 1 November and All Souls’ Day on 2 November. Over generations, religious observance and local custom became intertwined in the ways people remembered their dead.
I’m an atheist, but I understand the impulse to light a candle, speak a name or pause beside a chair someone used to occupy. You don’t need to believe in an afterlife to know how much of a person remains after they have died.
And in the wake tradition I grew up with, we stay with them before letting them go.
For two or three nights, the house might fill with people. Food arrives. Visitors are welcomed. Those closest to the person can be devastated, exhausted, grateful for company or scarcely aware of who has come. Around them, others quietly keep things going, finding something useful to do when words are of little use.
The person who has died remains at the centre of it all. We can sit beside them, touch their hand, look at their face. Children are there among adults and older people, absorbing something they might only understand years later. Death has entered the house, and the community comes in after it.
At some memorial gatherings overseas, I felt strangely lost because the body wasn’t there. I knew we had come to remember someone, but I kept wondering where they were.
It’s their fucking wake. They should be here.
That was my upbringing speaking. Funeral customs vary within England and elsewhere, where wakes and viewings also exist. Other cultures have rich, sometimes far more public ways of honouring their dead. But until those moments, I hadn’t realised how much the person’s physical presence meant to me.
The Irish home wake has a particular intimacy. Through centuries of colonial rule, emigration and enormous social change, people continued bringing their dead home. It is a tradition I’m glad we have kept.
There is room in that house to remember a whole person: their generosity and their awkwardness, the things that drove you mad, the expression everyone can imitate. Someone tells a story you’ve never heard. Someone else corrects it. For a moment, you can almost hear the person joining in.
Love lives in those details. So does laughter, even when the loss is almost more than people can bear.
Memento mori. Cuimhnigh go bhfaighidh tú bás. Remember that you will die.
The Latin phrase belongs to a wider philosophical tradition, but I recognise its meaning in those rooms. From childhood, I knew that death happened to people we loved, and that when it did, we went to them. We sat down. We stayed a while.
I wouldn’t claim an unbroken line from Samhain to the wake. Yet at this turning of the year, I hear an echo between the stories of the dead returning and the familiar act of bringing someone home.
Perhaps that is what draws me to Oíche Shamhna: the thought of an ordinary house on a dark evening, and a place kept ready for someone who is missed.
The kettle on, their name in the conversation, and room for them still.