David McGowan wants people to talk more about death, grief and their own mortality.

Despite Irish funeral rituals and traditions being lauded worldwide as something we do well, Ireland’s best-known undertaker still believes death is seen as a dark and taboo subject here, and he wants that to change.

That’s the main reason the Easkey native, who has funeral homes in Sligo and Ballina, first agreed to get involved in a documentary, The Funeral Director, which was a hit on Netflix. Now he has released his memoir A Life Among the Dead.

“I’m of the belief that if you never talk about something, you’ll always have a fear of it. I started my book with the thought of why aren’t people talking more about death – because it’s an essential part of the life cycle.”

“I’m 40 years in the business, and the one thing I’m sure about is that me and you and everyone else on this planet will leave it one day, so it should be talked about; that’s my opinion,” he adds.

In A Life Among the Dead, he tells his own personal story, saying he is uniquely placed to give his thoughts on grief and dying given that he’s “surrounded by death every day”.

A compelling and compassionate storyteller, it’s clear throughout the book that this way of life is a vocation for him. Helping the bereaved to navigate an often very painful grief journey is “very fulfilling, but is not without its challenges,” he says.

Prior to this, many will remember David coming to public attention in 2018, when he brought a decommissioned Boeing 767 to seaside village Enniscrone with the intention of developing a glamping village. “She’ll take off yet,” he says of the project that put the area on the map at the time.

David’s first experience of death came when he was working in the family pub at 14, which, like many others in rural areas, came with an associated undertaking business. His father asked him to help, “to put someone overboard”, a word used at the time associated with lifting and putting the deceased into a coffin.

This first contact with death didn’t faze him one bit, and it left him curious about the traditions, rituals, and culture that David says we are “steeped in” in rural Ireland.

He was also eager to learn “if I could do it better both for the deceased and the bereaved”. This led him to Cork, Northern Ireland, and later America where he was educated in the psychology of death and dying.

“It wasn’t until I got into that college course that I actually realised why I was doing it [undertaking]. I was helping people with the biggest loss that any human will experience in their lifetime,” he says.

A Life Among the Dead by David McGowan.

While there, the Sligo native worked in a major undertaking operation in Chicago, and he has many interesting stories from the time, including a Mafia funeral and inadvertently working with an undercover FBI agent. He ultimately returned home because the business there was “very commercialised” and he believes in the funeral rites in Ireland.

“Certain aspects of funeral services have changed – as well as attitudes to death and dying – but our rituals and traditions are very much alive, especially in rural Ireland.”

Cremation is on the rise now, making up 25% of his funerals; there are celebrations of life now rather than services, but the wake remains important to people.

“There are a lot more choices out there, but the root [of the traditions] is still there. People want their loved ones home. They want to spend a couple of nights with them. They want to have a wake and they want the community coming in and sympathising with them.

“People still want that, and how I know that for sure is we learned it during Covid when that wasn’t allowed. They missed the hug, the chat, the talk, and the stories.”

Unexplained

Spirituality is everywhere in the book, and there are some things David cannot explain. “I’ve seen things happen that you couldn’t say are coincidences. Totally unexplained,” says David before going on to tell a story about his brand-new hearse.

“During a funeral, it just stopped on a bridge – this was only the second trip in it. Luckily, there was a guard of honour, and we were on a hill and I asked everyone to put their hand on the hearse and push it towards the door of the cathedral, which was still 500m away. It was all downhill and that’s how we got the hearse to the door.”

Embarrassed and disappointed, David worried about meeting the family after no fault could be found with the vehicle.

He need not have worried. “They started kissing and hugging me and saying ‘how did you think to stop at Dad’s favourite place’? That’s where he fished from, the very spot where he fished every day in the fishing season.

“There was one person who made that hearse stop there, and that was the person in the coffin,” he says. “I totally believe that the spirit is around for 28 to 30 days after death. That’s why people used to turn chairs upside down and put cloths on mirrors, because the older people felt that as well.

“They [spirit] then move off somewhere else [after 30 days]. My thoughts on it are that wherever they are, they are happy.”

While some will light candles in a church to talk to the spirit, he believes in the power of water, a walk on the beach, or in a forest as therapeutic.

Unafraid of his own mortality, David has talked about his own funeral with daughters Bríd, Mary and Eithne, who are all embalmers in the business. “I’ve told them I want to be cremated. Now, I’ve said if you decide you want a place to go [a grave] by all means do it. If it helps you cope, that’s fine. I’ll be gone to the next world. I’ll be happy out, and I believe I will.”

A Life Among the Dead: Stories from an Irish Funeral Director (Headline Publishing Group, €14.99).