The Last Good Funeral of the Year: A Memoir by Ed O’Loughlin
Reviewed by Cath Barton
‘We are haunted, most of all, by ourselves.’
There can be few people in the world unaffected by the pandemic of the past two years. Making sense of this time will take, for all of us, a while longer. Amongst writers and readers alike, there will be those who seek to flee all that it has stirred up for them, but others drawn to it as subject matter, whether for fiction as in Sarah Hall’s searing portrayal of an even-worse-than-Covid-19 pandemic in her 2021 novel Burntcoat , or memoir, as in Ed O’Loughlin’s The Last Good Funeral of the Year.
For Irish-Canadian O’Loughlin, one-time war correspondent and now novelist living in Dublin, it is something that happens just before what we now refer to as ‘the first lockdown’ that leads him into a series of reflections about his life and his relationships. In February 2020 he hears of the death of a woman who, twenty-seven years previously, was one of his first girlfriends. The relationship lasted only a few months; he says that he wasn’t even in love with her. Yet this death – and the funeral that gives him the title of his book– stirs him greatly. He finds that ‘his imagination, always overactive, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets’.
In writing of his regrets O’Loughlin is never maudlin. He writes for the most part in the third person. His account of the suicide attempts of his brother Simon, told from the point of ‘the eldest brother’ (himself) reads as completely dispassionate. Until that is, he tells of taking his own daughters on a trip during their midterm holidays, twenty years after his brother’s death. Driving near the graveyard where Simon is buried, he hesitates but does not stop. This is when we learn that the girls know nothing of this uncle, that telling them would be for another time and that ‘Until then, Simon would remain in the family silence.’
Chronicling his reflections month by month, O’Loughlin reaches April 2020, and, with his daughters now stuck at home on what should have been a school day, he tells them stories of when he was working as a journalist in South Africa, but finds, when he re-examines his past, that he has blanked major details of his life. With admirably brutal honesty he faces up to his life as what he now thinks of as a ‘glorified tourist’, and associated feelings of shame and guilt – ‘like many of his nation, he was excessively fond of guilt.’ There is, though no self-pity in his account, rather what feels like an attempt to lay ghosts to rest, and to honour other deaths, including those people with Covid-19, ‘dying alone in intensive care, desperate for someone, even a stranger, to hold their hand as they go.’
This memoir is not a depressing read, for all that there is much in it about loss, including O’Loughlin’s hearing problems. The chapter of the book in which he considers how these may have come about leads him into fascinating musings about sounds such as the Hum and the high frequency calls of the Loneliest Whale in the World, heard but never yet seen, and his wish for such mysteries to evade scientific explanation.
The Last Good Funeral of the Year is a book that merits a second read, a second consideration, as surely all of us over the halfway point of our lives must give to the memories we treasure and the people from our past who have helped to shape the way we are today, as well as to O’Loughlin’s suggestion that laughter is the sanest response to the inevitability of ageing.
The Last Good Funeral of the Year is published by riverrun, 3rd March 2022