The Keening Ladies

When I was 21, there was a death in the family, and then the wake.

All that day, and at that wake, I was in a strange state.  When I walked into the funeral home, with my shattered family, I heard a dreadful, howling, moaning noise coming from one corner of the room.  Several women were sitting together, looking down, making the noise.  "What is THAT?" I asked my father.  "Those are the keening ladies" he answered.  This was what the keening sounded like:

Keening Sample

My father went on: "Those are ladies who come to wakes to keen".  He treated the whole subject in an offhand way.   Looking for distraction, I immediately wanted to know the gritty details of being a keening lady.  Was money involved?  How were new keeners recruited?  Was there a central clearing house so that keeners ended up where they were needed?  But the conversation ended,  other events intruded, and I was forced, very much against my wishes, back to the matter at hand.

 I didn't think about the keening ladies for the next 40 years or so. One night I was doing a "life review" -- the obsessive wading through all painful times, whether as actor or acted on -- and the keening ladies popped up.  My first thought was that I must have misunderstood the whole situation, but the second was that keening and keeners made perfect sense.  These were, after all, the South Side Irish, in Chicago, whose odd rituals were hidden far from the surface, disguised as the ordinary, and whose emotional lives are still a mystery to me after all these years.  Still, the keening ladies were an odd note.  Where had it all come from?

From Ireland. Christianity reached Ireland -- St. Patrick, of the snakes -- in the 6th century.  It was a loosely organized religion;  there were monks and nuns and all, but there was also leftover pagan ritual and song from the pre-christian days. And keening, I'm sure.

Around the 12th century, order was imposed, and pagan ways were no longer welcome. Rigid doctrine accompanied rigid emotional control.  The sources I found report that by the late 19th century,  after 800 years of effort, the church was satisfied that keening was found only in the most primitive parts of Ireland.  And the south side of Chicago?

How could that be?  In the 1950s, the first generation of adults born in America took control of Irish life, and expunged their own history.  There were exceptions, but the ambitious upwardly mobile, the new heart of the urban middle class, put all that behind them.   All of the habits and objects of the old country just vanished.  Except the church.

We all pretended that the church was sui generis, even if everyone in the parish was Irish, including the priests.  There were no ways to think about what we came from, of what our own group, or church, had as history.  We had no special food,  Irish Gaelic never made it across the water, there weren't any unique clothes to be brought out on holidays.  A few exceptions, not many;  middle class teeth ground when the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame were mentioned.  There wasn't dual consciousness.  Irish was the dominant culture, but there wasn't even single consciousness.

And then, from the corner of the room, keening.

How does that noise stay in a hidden place, maybe for generations?  How did it just appear when my family was broken? My father certainly knew about keening, even saw it as commonplace.  But I think, in any other circumstance, keening was not known to him.  Knowing and not knowing at the same time is not unique to the Irish, but edging so far into not knowing leaves an awful lot of room for confusion.

Four steps distance from keening:  in the 5th century from pagan to christian.  In the 12th century, christian/pagan to rigid christian. In the 19th century immigration, old country to new. And, in my 20th century, peasant to nascent middle class.  Keening made it through with us, even if we didn't know.

At the wake, middle class ceremony went on as usual,  and the social expressions of sympathy and grief were made.  But, over there, in those chairs, were the keening ladies.  They were not an intrusion;  their keening was in the air, and nowhere else.  Keening altered our minds and emotions, and tore through all our cells.  Almost 50 years later, keening is what I remember of that day.
 
Now, I go to school every Saturday so I can learn to play the uilleann pipes, a uniquely Irish instrument.    I still haven't quite stopped not paying attention to what isn't there.