An Grá Mór
There’s a thing that can run through you without your consent—a noise you might not know you make: the sound of your grief. The Irish ear was once very attuned to sorrowful sounds—and the throat, too.
There is an ancient tradition in Ireland called keening. Keeners would wail from the depths of their souls at wakes—they’d ‘gol’. It was to escort the spirit in passing onwards safely. It was a lament ritual, an embodied release of grief that resonated through everyone present, drawing forth their own sorrow. It brought the weight of loss to the surface, shared it, and transformed it into something bearable. Traditionally, it was women who keened, while men performed eulogies—storytelling of the deceased.
In modern times, we don’t keen anymore. It’s as good as extinct, bar the pockets of revival emerging in workshops around the island, satisfying the growing interest in our roots. It could be said that we have learned to suppress and move on, rather than fully express. Grief becomes a private burden, hidden behind closed hearts or carried silently on shoulders to work. The fear of breaking down, coming apart, or appearing weak is an unspoken incentive to keep a lid on it. But grief doesn’t disappear. It waits, metastasising with each new hurt, until it either consumes us entirely or is finally expelled. I’ve learned this the hard way.
It wouldn’t be accurate to call the event a panic attack; it wasn’t panic-induced. We have few terms to articulate acute waning, other than ‘breaking down’ or ‘having a panic attack’. I was grief-stricken. I couldn’t hold it down that day. I barely managed to return my son to his mother’s house without breaking down at the wheel. My little boy was asleep in the passenger seat, tuckered out after our mountain cabin escape.
When I got home and hung up our bikes, I collapsed. There, on the garage floor, the gol rushed from an unknown depth within. I wasn’t just crying; I was keening. The wail became a howl, then a growl, and on all fours, the growl swelled into a frothy roar. I was intoxicated with rage—murderous rage—and purging. Twice more that day, I fell under the weight of single fatherhood. Twice more, I wailed and cursed every person who, even for a moment, obstructed the way to my son. And then, I went to work and tended to my clients—with a smile.
This grief bubbled up and broke me open. It poured out of me, raw and unrestrainable. Looking back, I see it as something primal, something ancient, as a human animal my body had to discharge my psyche (soul). It was keening without the wake, a ritual without the community. I wonder now: what might have changed if I’d had a ritual to help ventilate that load?
The rituals of before are fading from cultural relevance. We seem to be largely without the traditions that unburdened the emotional complexity of existence. The keen is the big sister to the ancient Irish tradition of Sean Nós; gatherings of song sharing in the native tongue, often sung while holding the hand of the person to your left—‘turning’ the song together. These fireside gatherings were opportunities to hear ancestral stories woven into the melodies, shared by your neighbour. Songs and their stories were exchanged and traveled the land through their hosts. Stories of lament and joy, love and loss, flowed. Each gathering carried emotional waves, lightening both the load and the heart.
I was never shown a way to process grief, nor even look at it. ‘Get on with it’ has been the motto of my time. It’s easy to see how any generation severed from the traditions that save our souls would find a similar ethos. I appreciate getting on with it over not getting on at all, but I’d prefer to know how to get along with it—how to know my grief, my emotional burdens, and transform them before they reform me without consent, again.
I recently reflected on the journey I undertook to explore my relationship with my voice. The thesis of this course was that our voice is the sound of our soul—choking or liberated. The facilitator, an accomplished Irish singer, was raised in a home that still hosts weekly Sean Nós gatherings. Her childhood bedroom lay above the hearth room, where hundreds—if not over a thousand—of these gatherings took place. Cáit Ní Rían proposed to us that getting to know your voice was getting to know your soul. And that songs have a soul of their own. She called the course Anam an Amhráin—The Soul of Song.
After six months of practicing chant, discovering the stories in Irish songs, and learning the ones that resonated, we gathered around Cáit’s home hearth to be heard. Throughout those six months, life for me transformed. I had been living oblivious to the Narnia on the other side of the Gaelic portal, and realised that life through the lens of a Gaeilgeoir (Irish speaker) is not the same living as that of an English-only speaking Irishman, like myself. The musicality of the language is formed by sentiment. An example is the word for love—Grá (graw). Its open-ended form gives freedom to the degree of love being expressed. You can put your love into the saying. And just like that, you can put your grief into the laments, your doting into the Aislings (songs of unreciprocated love), or your cry to rally hope, as I did, into Oró Sé Do Bheatha Abhaile.
Like my keen, when I opened—this time consensually—the song came from a deeper unknown within. It was greater than my grief; it was a story of warriors, led by Grace, returning to restore the beauty stolen by the trespassers they’ll rid. The title, sung repeatedly in chorus, is a cheering welcome home—a ballad of hope for beauty. The first line empathises with the afflicted woman, the personified island of Ireland, Éirú. The essence is that she will return to full bloom because of the will of the Gael to fight for her, and that we’d be so fortunate to witness that glory, if only for a week.
During the six months, I came across a fortune of wisdom. One such nugget I discovered was a video of young actor Andrew Garfield in an interview, discussing his sense of loss for his dearly departed mother. He reframed grief as ‘unexpressed love’—the love he can never give his mother. And that he felt fortunate as an artist to have a means to express this love. Another treasure came from the Gospel of Thomas:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
There are ancient ways to lighten our burdens, afflictions, and hearts, that are still accessible today. In the Irish art of living, Sean Nós is not just a tradition; it’s a gift—a way to welcome the intensity of love and the depth of being. Letting out what is within is not only to survive but to truly be alive.
