Finnegan's Wake

Mr. Timothy Finnegan was a Kilkenny man through and through. He had lived on Walkin Street all his life, inheriting the house when his parents had passed. Tim had the bushiest red beard and softest green eyes; for as much as he was a mountain of a man, he really was a big teddy bear. Bricklayers were part of the Building and Allied Trades’ Union in Ireland, and Tim was one of the hardest working members despite his strong love of whiskey. He was practically born with the bottle in his mouth, and had to have a glass every morning before work. But, with the stress of work and paying the bills, one glass before work had quickly turned into two, which then became four, and sometimes even seven.

One morning, Tim came stumbling onto a job site after eight glasses of Tullamore Dew, somehow thinking he was still in good enough shape to carry a hod up a ladder. Still, up the ladder he went, wobbling all the way. As he reached the top, Tim missed the last rung and came tumbling back down the ladder, bricks and all, smacking his head hard on the sidewalk below with a crack. His face turned ghost white, and his soft green eyes rolled back in his head.

The rest of the bricklayers crowded around Tim, trying to get him back on his feet, to no avail. Nothing could revive the mountain of a man; not smelling salts, not a hard smack in the face, nothing worked. “Well,” said the foreman with a sigh, “we have no choice but to pronounce the lad dead as a doornail.”

A committee of laborers was tasked with carrying poor Tim home to his poor wife. Mrs. Finnegan was a wreck, wailing with grief at the loss of her husband. She found a clean sheet for the men to wrap the body in, and they laid him out upon the bed. His friends thought it fitting to hold him in place with a barrel of whiskey at his feet and a bottle of porter at his head while Mrs. Finnegan made arrangements for the wake.

As everyone gathered for the wake that afternoon, Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch. Friends and relatives brought plenty of tea and cakes, and whiskey punch to go with the pipe tobacco afterwards. Then began the speeches and memories of dear Tim.

Biddy O’Brien, the neighborhood gossip, was a mess with tears. “Such a nice clean corpse did you ever see?” she wailed. “Tim, Mavourneen, why did you die?” She dramatically blew her nose in her handkerchief.

“Ah, shut yer gob,” said Paddy McGee. “Ye barely knew the man!”

“Oh, Biddy, you’re wrong I’m sure!” cried Maggie O’Connor, which did not sit well with Biddy. She was tired of being seen as the head of the rumor mill, and gave Maggie such a belt on the gob that she fell to the ground, sprawled across the floor.

“Argh! So Shilelagh Law it is then!” shouted an enraged Maggie. A row erupted in poor Mrs. Finnegan’s parlor, woman to woman and man to man. It’s a wonder the neighbors never called for the gardai; such a ruckus to be sure!

As fists were flying, so were a great number of bottles. One flew at Mickey Maloney, who raised his head. Thankfully for Mickey, the bottle missed him. “By Jaysus!” he bellowed in shock, as the bottle landed on the bed and the liquor splattered over Tim.

Everyone held their breath as the dead man rose from the bed. Holding his head and shaking off the liquor, Tim groaned as a zombie rising from the grave.

“Whirl yer whiskey around like blazes!” he yelled. “T’underin’ Jaysus, d’ya think I’m dead?!”

And so Finnegan’s wake became a great celebration of life in quite a different sense.