Rory Gibson: ‘I’d give up all my Christmases to attend my own wake’

When people gather to send off the deceased, they come together out of love, affection or respect. There’s no other agenda but to acknowledge the impact that person had on one’s life.

I went to a memorial service for the man who taught me how to fish.

He was my uncle, and I loved him a lot. Lots of people did.

Grant was that sort of bloke – a big character who lived a large life centred around his family and friends. People lined up to deliver eulogies both touching and funny.

While getting drunk with my cousins and sharing stories about their dad, it struck me that I like ceremonies surrounding the dead much more than the rituals of life.

It never used to be that way, but something foul has hijacked the milestones between arrival and departure.

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A prime example is Christmas. December is an intolerable month of megaphone marketing and pressure to buy, buy, buy all in the name of peace on Earth and goodwill to all cash registers.

For fractured families it is a horrible time. They are forced by convention to play out a charade of togetherness or have their distress amplified by the empty chairs around the dinner table.

Birthdays have become a showcase of excess among pretentious parents determined to turn their children into entitled brats.

And for adults, the annual acknowledgment of the day you hit the maternity ward floor is inevitably ruined by a banal ditty that should not be sung to anyone over the age of three. I make a point of never going back to a restaurant where the staff come out and sing Happy Birthday to customers.

Weddings can be lovely, but too many of them aren’t. The worst ones cost too much, go on for too long, thrust people totally unsuited to sharing each other’s company into each other’s company, and inevitably end in tears – sometimes on the night.

I could go on, but suffice to say the milestones of birth, life and romance are being exploited as opportunities to make money, thereby diminishing their emotional power.

Not so death. When people gather to send off the deceased, they come together out of love, affection or respect. There’s no other agenda but to acknowledge the impact that person had on one’s life. Everyone present is linked by a common thread.

I’d give up all my Christmases to attend my own wake.