A friend told me recently that whenever her mother phones, her small child pipes up, “Who’s dead?” and it’s true that the litany of the dead and the dying is increasingly the subject of conversation. Our deeply Irish interest in the details of others’ deaths (what I like to think of as the Who-By-Fire of it all) is brought to bold and brilliant life here, reminding us that this is neither nostalgia nor maudlin, but a noticing of people, a marking of who they were and the lives they led.
Con McCarthy is the local “connoisseur of death”, a figure of dread and fun, in his “enormous, suffering overcoat”. When pressed, Con says he finds death impressive – it is the one question we will all be asked yet to which “not one of us can make the report after”. The story shines in the darkly funny specifics of the deaths described, which put us on the side of the narrator, leaving poor Con alone carries the burden of ridicule and remembering.
When we are gone from memory, the story insists, then we are really gone.
The story appeared online in the Irish Times on 1 January 2020 and is collected in That Old Country Music, Canongate, 2020
A Personal Anthology 