So culturally embedded are our death rituals that they are honoured and commemorated in a museum in Waterford city, The Irish Wake Museum. I didn’t know this museum existed until I walked past it a couple of days ago. How could I not take a trip inside?

Housed in an early 15th Century alms house in the heart of Waterford, the museum explores Ireland’s funeral rituals from pre-Christian times, through the Vikings and up to the present day.

It was easy to see how memorial objects from the 1400s – commemorative pendants, coins and jewellery have been transformed into the memorial cards of the dead that are given out today.

I was familiar with the origins of the wake and many of the rituals surrounding it. The two or three days of sitting with the dead to ensure they really were dead. The liminality of the wake, when clocks are stopped (literally), mirrors are covered to prevent the spirit of the deceased from getting trapped, and when there is much socialising and, despite the circumstances, merriment. In certain parts of Ireland, keeners were brought in; women who performed highly ritualised keening (from the Irish ag caoineadh – to cry) over the body.

I learned that women were generally the ones who prepared the deceased for the wake because, on account of their ability to give birth, women were more able to defy death.

I learned that, in the old days, the drinking and socialising at wakes so concerned the Catholic church that notices were put up stating that unmarried young men and women who were unrelated were not allowed to be in attendance at a wake from sunset to sunrise!

It was heartwarming to see our death rituals so faithfully rendered and retold, sharing this part of our culture with visitors and instilling a sense of pride and belonging in those of us for whom this is a living and evolving tradition.