What Was an American Wake? The Irish Farewell

On an October night in 1847, in a house in north Mayo, a family held a wake for a young man who was not dead. He sat among the mourners at his own fire. There was food on the table that the family could ill spare, music in the room, dancing, and before morning there was open weeping. At first light he took up his bundle and walked to the road, and the townland walked with him as far as the crossroads. Then they stopped, and he went on alone.

So what was an American wake? It was the farewell rural Ireland gave its emigrants on the night before they left, and it was called a wake deliberately. Everyone in that kitchen understood the parting as a kind of death. The son or daughter sailing for America would, in all likelihood, never stand in the house again. So the community did the only thing it knew to do with a death. It sat up through the night with the one it was losing.

A funeral for the living

The custom went by other names in other districts, the live wake, the farewell supper, in some places the bottle night, but the name that lasted tells you the most. Irish country people waked their dead at home, through the night, with neighbours, food, drink, prayer and story. When emigration began to empty the parishes, they turned the same ceremony toward the living, because that is what the leaving amounted to. An Atlantic passage cost a sum a labouring family could not easily raise twice. The distance, once crossed, was for most people final. To the families holding these gatherings, the person leaving was passing out of their world for good, and they said so with the shape of the night itself.

The custom is older than the Famine, and it outlived the Famine by generations. The fullest accounts of it were collected in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and it held on longest where the old ways generally held on, among the small farms of the Catholic west of Ireland, Mayo among them, in the very townlands that lost the most people to the boats. That is worth pausing on. The American wake was not a one-year custom born of catastrophe. It was the settled ritual of a society that expected, decade after decade, to keep saying goodbye.

What was an American wake like, hour by hour

It began days before the sailing. The emigrant went from house to house through the townland, calling on neighbours and friends and asking them to come, an invitation delivered in person, much the way news of a death travelled. On the evening itself the kitchen was cleared and the food laid out, the women of the house baking for a crowd, the guests bringing more, the men arriving with drink, beer and often a drop of poitín.

Then came the strange double life of the night. There was music, dancing, card games, songs, story after story, and everyone understood that the gaiety was for the one leaving, a last dance in the only kitchen that would ever feel like this one. And as the small hours came, the music slowed. The songs turned to laments. Women keened, the old formal grief that had been poured out over the Irish dead for centuries, keened now over a living person sitting upright in their good clothes in the middle of the room, listening to themselves being mourned.

In the morning came the part that survivors seem never to have forgotten: the convoy. Family, friends and neighbours walked the emigrant out along the road, sometimes for miles, as far as an agreed place, a crossroads or the turn of the road. There the older people made their goodbyes, because they could go no further, and stood watching until the walking figure passed out of sight. For a mother of sixty, that turning in the road was, and she knew it was, the last sight of her child she was likely to have in this life.

Why they keened for the living

Because they were usually right. The fare was ruinous to raise a second time, the working life waiting in America was long and hard, and there was no cheap or quick way back. A letter took weeks in each direction. A visit took savings that took decades. Most of those who left never came home again, and everyone at the fire knew it, including the emigrant.

And yet the American wake was not despair. The same night held the other truth of Irish emigration: the one leaving was very often the family’s best hope. Wages would come back across the water. The first American money folded into an envelope could pay the rent, buy seed, keep a roof over the old people. A prepaid ticket could bring out the next sister or brother. Ireland grieved its emigrants and depended on them, both at once, for a hundred years, and the wake held both truths in one room without pretending either of them away. The grief was honest. So was the hope.

Black ‘47, and one wake in Ballycastle

In the famine years the farewells multiplied past counting. The worst of it was Black ‘47, when fever and hunger moved through Mayo together and the workhouses at Ballina and Westport filled far past their doors. Leaving stopped being one family’s misfortune and became the common weather of the parish. And in that year the sea passage waiting beyond the wake was itself deadly. The overcrowded, under-provisioned sailings of that season became the crossing that gave the coffin ships their name, and families waked their emigrants in the honest knowledge that the ship might finish what the hunger had begun.

That is the night where the letters this site publishes begin. In October 1847, Brigid O’Donnell of Ballycastle holds an American wake for her son Seán, twenty-one years old that autumn, and three weeks later, not knowing whether he is alive, landed or lost, she sits down and writes to him. The family is fiction, and we say so plainly. Everything around them is true to the year: the workhouse, the failing oats, a letter carried into Ballina by a neighbour in the hope it might find a ship. You can read Brigid’s first letter, written three weeks after her son’s wake, and you will notice it does what the real letters of that autumn had to do. It reaches into the dark and asks, are you living, and have you bread?

The last night a family spent whole

If your people left the west of Ireland at any time in the hundred years after the Famine, there is a fair chance a night like this sits somewhere behind your family’s story, unrecorded: a kitchen full of neighbours, a fiddle slowing towards morning, and a figure walking away in the early light. Book One, Famine and Farewell follows Brigid through the eleven years after the night she waked her living son, and the same family, and the same thread of paper, runs on through all eight Books of the century of letters. The wake was the last night a family spent whole. The letters were how it stayed a family afterwards.