Book Review: My Father ’s Wake: How the Irish teach us to live, love and die by Kevin Toolis

by Rebecca Gagne Henderson (@RebeccaGagne)The tone and theme of this book is set with the profound and moving epigraph from the Iliad:“The generations of men are like generations of leaves. The wind scatters one year’s leaves on to the earth, but when Spring comes the luxuriant forest produces other leaves; so it is with generations of men, one grows as the other comes to an end”. Iliad 6 --145The book is titledMy Father ’s Wake: How the Irish teach us to live, love and die. Mr. Toolis is a writer, journalist and award-winning filmmaker and documentarian. His family has lived for two centuries in a small seaside village on the Irish Isle of Achill. His childhood in a provincially engrained Irish island culture coupled with his expanding cosmopolitan world experience influences a broadening view of life and death culture. This Homeric journey through the author ’s memoirs of witnessing death experiences in a variety of circumstances is written through a decidedly Western and Celtic prism. He blends the realities of his real-world journalistic experiences of war, famine, natural disaster and death with an elegant overlay of the humanities and culture.Toolis offers us an historic autobiography of the wake through the ages, but it is much more than that alone. He reminds us of what we have lost and surrendered to medicine and technology, or as he refers to it; “The Western Death Machine”. While we palliative care types attempt to imbue sacredness at the bedside whic...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: book book review culture diversity gagne henderson Source Type: blogs