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The Last Good Funeral of the Year
Soon, the lockdown would start. People would die alone, without any proper ceremony. Charlotte's death would be washed away, the first drop in a downpour. Nobody knew it then but hers would be the last good funeral of the year.
It was February 2020, when Ed O'Loughlin heard that Charlotte, a woman he'd known had died, young and before her time. He realised that he was being led to reappraise his life, his family and his career as a foreign correspondent and acclaimed novelist in a new, colder light.
He was suddenly faced with facts that he had been ignoring, that he was getting old, that he wasn't what he used to be, that his imagination, always over-active, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets. He saw he was mourning his former self, not Charlotte.
The search for meaning becomes the driving theme of O'Loughlin's year of confinement. He remembers his brother Simon, a suicide at thirty; the journalists and photographers with whom he covered wars in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, wars that are hard to explain and never really stopped; his habit of shedding baggage, an excuse for hurrying past and not dwelling on things.
Moving, funny, and searingly honest, The Last Good Funeral of the Year takes the reader on a circular journey from present to past and back to the present: 'Could any true story end any other way?'
It was February 2020, when Ed O'Loughlin heard that Charlotte, a woman he'd known had died, young and before her time. He realised that he was being led to reappraise his life, his family and his career as a foreign correspondent and acclaimed novelist in a new, colder light.
He was suddenly faced with facts that he had been ignoring, that he was getting old, that he wasn't what he used to be, that his imagination, always over-active, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets. He saw he was mourning his former self, not Charlotte.
The search for meaning becomes the driving theme of O'Loughlin's year of confinement. He remembers his brother Simon, a suicide at thirty; the journalists and photographers with whom he covered wars in Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, wars that are hard to explain and never really stopped; his habit of shedding baggage, an excuse for hurrying past and not dwelling on things.
Moving, funny, and searingly honest, The Last Good Funeral of the Year takes the reader on a circular journey from present to past and back to the present: 'Could any true story end any other way?'
- GenresMemoirNonfictionIreland
208 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
February 28, 2022
Irish people go to funerals. They circle the wagons, count the survivors. Everyone could still hug and kiss, wipe away the tears and snot, shake hands with her husband, her family, her kids. Nobody knew it then, but this would be the last good funeral of the year.
Learning in February of 2020 that an old girlfriend (it was a brief fling, they were never “in love”, and they knew enough people in common to have kept casually crossing paths over the intervening twenty-eight years) had died of cancer, author Ed O’Loughlin found himself suddenly feeling old and unmoored and casting about for the meaning of it all. When pandemic-related lockdowns then hit and O’Loughlin was relegated to an attic boxroom to do his writing (while his wife and daughters did their own writing and schoolwork downstairs), he found himself going back over his life — an unhappy childhood, family loss, years as a foreign correspondent before turning to writing literature, his current happy home — and the result is The Last Good Funeral of the Year. By turns touching and funny, always interesting and contemplative, I most appreciated learning how details from O’Loughlin’s personal life show up in his novels (him having been a journalist in Africa and the Middle East makes so much sense now that I know it), and if nothing else, this makes for a fine record of the 2020 experience in first rate prose. This might appeal most to a niche audience (although I think everyone should be reading this author), and as for me, I loved it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He told himself this from the start: this wasn’t just about Charlotte. It was about him suddenly being faced with facts he’d been ignoring — that he was getting old, that he wasn’t what he used to be, that his imagination, always overactive, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets. Anyone could see the gears turning, the facile clockwork. It was selfish and dishonest. And worse, it was dull.
What I’ve read of O’Loughlin has always engaged me at a deep level; his writing simply speaks to me. So whether he’s writing about the “banality” of his unhappy childhood (I understand too well the “habits of secrecy and shame” that small children of quarrelling parents acquire) or describing falling “through a trapdoor into his twenties” while walking along Edmonton’s High Level Bridge in the middle of a winter's night (I spent most of my twenties in Edmonton and that’s where my own trapdoor of nostalgia would lead), it’s all familiar and relatable and well-captured. And where O’Loughlin is writing about his years as a foreign correspondent (reporting from South Africa or Somalia or the Middle East), I was fascinated by what he witnessed and intrigued that he carried over a journalist’s refusal to put himself in the story he was writing (to “distance himself from the scene of the crime”) by continuing to refer to himself in the third person throughout this memoir. The tone changes abruptly in one section that reads as a tongue-in-cheek, chapter-long stream-of-consciousness:
he said to his wife once he said if I ever start writing about being a writer or about a fictional writer who is writing a book get a five-pound steel lump hammer and strike me repeatedly on the back of the head
I both liked the way that this section seemed to capture the in-your-headness of being in a continuing lockdown, without O’Loughlin actually taking it too seriously, writing at one point:
an artist friend once told him that he thought writing was the purest art because you can’t hide behind the form and when you’re writing you always have to try to find something new and he said that for example someone had told him about a recent American novel that was only one long sentence and it had won experimental prizes and wasn’t that an interesting idea and he told his artist friend that in the past five years not one but two novels that were only one long sentence had won the big English prize for experimental fiction and that Joyce first ran that experiment a century before and his artist friend laughed
But then the tone changes back, there’s another funeral, more ghosts and cemeteries and the weighing of a life, and by the end, O’Loughlin comes to some thoughtful conclusions:
So now he had, after all, a photograph of himself with Charlotte, from their short time together, a long time ago. It hurt now to think of them all, happy there together, but here was the evidence, a last-minute twist. But what did it prove? We were. That’s all. It was good. And some of us continue. Could any true story end any other way?
Again, this might have niche appeal, but I do hope O’Loughlin sells enough copies to buy those hearing aids; at least while we’re still wearing masks and he doesn’t know he’s being cussed at without the help of subconscious lip-reading. And I hope he writes many more novels and that I get to read them.
March 11, 2022
My Rating ~ 3.5*
The Last Good Funeral of the Year by Ed O’ Loughlin was just published March 3rd with riverrun and is described as a book that ‘takes the reader on a circular journey from present to past and back to the present…moving, funny, and searingly honest’.
Reading a memoir always feels like one is sneaking around inside the mind of a random stranger, rifling through their memories and tip-toeing around their thoughts and dreams. It is a very personal space to enter and, in the case of Ed O’ Loughlin, it feels like he is exposing his perceived weaknesses and fears to us all in this very honest and brave account of his life, and the moment, just before March 2020, when he had an epiphany of sorts, he was getting old.
On hearing of the death of Charlotte, a woman he had had a brief relationship with in the past, he was suddenly overcome with a feeling of melancholy . He experienced terrible guilt for not knowing she was sick, about the fact that he had not made contact with her. He was struck down by feelings of remorse and was out of sorts with the world. But then he had a moment, a realisation…
‘He told himself this from the start: this wasn’t just about Charlotte. It was about him suddenly being faced with facts he’d been ignoring – that he was getting old, that he wasn’t what he used to be, that his imagination, always overactive, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets’
His wife suggested he was perhaps being a little ‘self-indulgent’ and he was inclined to agree. He attended Charlotte’s funeral but what he, and every other mourner attending, hadn’t known then was that it would be ‘the last good funeral of the year’. As the Pandemic took hold, everything changed.
In his memoir Ed O’ Loughlin thinks back to his earlier years, his time spent with Charlotte, his years overseas in far-flung places as a journalist, he remembers his brother Simon, who sadly took his own life, he recalls meeting his wife. He talks about his experiences and how he compartmentalised and dealt with some of the horrors he witnessed.
‘He decided that if he was going to have adventures in places like this, he would distance himself from the scene of the crime. He would never write news in the first-person singular…he told himself then that he had no right to climb onstage for someone else’s death scene. Nor would he complain about how these scenes made him feel. He was, at best, a paid witness. Earn your pay honestly and go on to the next one. For years, he prided himself on this old-school detachment, as if playing by the old rules would somehow indemnify him for all the adventures he would have on the back of other people’s suffering, the mortgage it would pay.’
Throughout this book there are numerous sentences, paragraphs and chapters that will resonate with so many of us for different reasons. Any parent will see themselves as they watch their children outgrow the protective bubble that has been there from birth, when the school run no longer involves you walking your child to the front door, when they start to venture on their own out into the big bad world.
I especially love one particular description where Ed O’ Loughlin is writing about the marks we put on our doors/walls when measuring our kids as they grow up. This really is beautifully phrased and poignantly described.
‘We are haunted, most of us all, by ourselves. Those marks on the wall don’t show stages of growth but reinventions, newer versions of the child, another Russian doll to shut in all the others. Strangers still live in this house, inside the teen and the pre-teen, and inside the adults, who are trying so hard to ignore them. The big kids are in charge now, and don’t want to remember their old games, but younger selves watch the world through borrowed old eyes, passing their own judgements, still dreaming former lives.’
The Last Good Funeral of the Year is a reappraisal of a life well-lived, yet I expect one that is shadowed with an interminable guilt. Ed O’ Loughlin exposes his vulnerability for us all to analyse and pick apart, which is a very courageous and admirable thing to do. A very honest and, at times, haunting read The Last Good Funeral of the Year is the introspective journey of a man who is mourning for his past and who is very unsure of the road ahead. A philosophical and potent memoir.
The Last Good Funeral of the Year by Ed O’ Loughlin was just published March 3rd with riverrun and is described as a book that ‘takes the reader on a circular journey from present to past and back to the present…moving, funny, and searingly honest’.
Reading a memoir always feels like one is sneaking around inside the mind of a random stranger, rifling through their memories and tip-toeing around their thoughts and dreams. It is a very personal space to enter and, in the case of Ed O’ Loughlin, it feels like he is exposing his perceived weaknesses and fears to us all in this very honest and brave account of his life, and the moment, just before March 2020, when he had an epiphany of sorts, he was getting old.
On hearing of the death of Charlotte, a woman he had had a brief relationship with in the past, he was suddenly overcome with a feeling of melancholy . He experienced terrible guilt for not knowing she was sick, about the fact that he had not made contact with her. He was struck down by feelings of remorse and was out of sorts with the world. But then he had a moment, a realisation…
‘He told himself this from the start: this wasn’t just about Charlotte. It was about him suddenly being faced with facts he’d been ignoring – that he was getting old, that he wasn’t what he used to be, that his imagination, always overactive, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets’
His wife suggested he was perhaps being a little ‘self-indulgent’ and he was inclined to agree. He attended Charlotte’s funeral but what he, and every other mourner attending, hadn’t known then was that it would be ‘the last good funeral of the year’. As the Pandemic took hold, everything changed.
In his memoir Ed O’ Loughlin thinks back to his earlier years, his time spent with Charlotte, his years overseas in far-flung places as a journalist, he remembers his brother Simon, who sadly took his own life, he recalls meeting his wife. He talks about his experiences and how he compartmentalised and dealt with some of the horrors he witnessed.
‘He decided that if he was going to have adventures in places like this, he would distance himself from the scene of the crime. He would never write news in the first-person singular…he told himself then that he had no right to climb onstage for someone else’s death scene. Nor would he complain about how these scenes made him feel. He was, at best, a paid witness. Earn your pay honestly and go on to the next one. For years, he prided himself on this old-school detachment, as if playing by the old rules would somehow indemnify him for all the adventures he would have on the back of other people’s suffering, the mortgage it would pay.’
Throughout this book there are numerous sentences, paragraphs and chapters that will resonate with so many of us for different reasons. Any parent will see themselves as they watch their children outgrow the protective bubble that has been there from birth, when the school run no longer involves you walking your child to the front door, when they start to venture on their own out into the big bad world.
I especially love one particular description where Ed O’ Loughlin is writing about the marks we put on our doors/walls when measuring our kids as they grow up. This really is beautifully phrased and poignantly described.
‘We are haunted, most of us all, by ourselves. Those marks on the wall don’t show stages of growth but reinventions, newer versions of the child, another Russian doll to shut in all the others. Strangers still live in this house, inside the teen and the pre-teen, and inside the adults, who are trying so hard to ignore them. The big kids are in charge now, and don’t want to remember their old games, but younger selves watch the world through borrowed old eyes, passing their own judgements, still dreaming former lives.’
The Last Good Funeral of the Year is a reappraisal of a life well-lived, yet I expect one that is shadowed with an interminable guilt. Ed O’ Loughlin exposes his vulnerability for us all to analyse and pick apart, which is a very courageous and admirable thing to do. A very honest and, at times, haunting read The Last Good Funeral of the Year is the introspective journey of a man who is mourning for his past and who is very unsure of the road ahead. A philosophical and potent memoir.
August 15, 2022
…now that he thought back, he had another good reason for missing Charlotte McDonald. She alone from that time had offered some forgiveness. He didn’t realize it until it was too late, but she had been his last link, though half-forgotten, in the background, to some other not-quite-finished business. He had just lost his only friendly witness.This memoir shouldn’t have hit me as hard as it did, but there you go, it knocked me into a long conversation with the me of about 40 years ago. All my witnesses are gone too, all my friends who would have remembered me then and even earlier, and this is the single most painful symptom of growing older. The author delves into his feelings around a number of events, especially his friend's death and that of his younger brother, and explains in a roundabout way why this book is written in the third person:
…He should have kept a diary, even a superficial one. I he had, he could have turned it into some sort of book, the sort of book that reporters write. But to write that book, a non-fiction one, in the first person, he would have had to find a theme for it, and he would have had to be part of that theme. And he didn’t interest himself enough to want to use himself as a character. So he stuck to the sugar rush of other people’s stories…Ah but it isn’t all grief (or commas although they grow like tiny irritating whiskers everywhere) or pain. There are also some very funny lines and delicious turns of phrase scattered throughout, like “failure continues to evade him” and “not being Irish, Jeroen is seeing a psychiatrist.” The whole book deserves close reading, and will be on my gift list for a number of people this year. 4 1/2 stars.
…all this was fine, no problem at all, just doing the job - until twenty years later, when his kids wanted a ghost story, and he realized, as he told it, the he was now one of its ghosts.
April 11, 2022
I thought all stories were strong. I thought they could have been connected a bit more; I felt like mid-summer it sort of divulges. But isn't that how the beginning months of the pandemic felt? Sort of reflective, questioning, and connecting the dots where they come?
I liked this a lot. Very vulnerable.
I liked this a lot. Very vulnerable.
May 15, 2022
I feel like the concept for this book is more promising than the actual book. It's sold as a reflective on life as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it ends up feeling like middle-ages navel-gazing. As someone that doesn't mind reading about teen angst, I'm not immediately averse to this, but the imagery used, and the prose style felt really long and unending. I'm not sure if this was done deliberately to echo the feeling of time during the pandemic - if so, its done exceptionally well. However, maybe it is just still too close to the bone, but this was really unenjoyable for me.
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May 17, 2022How deeply this resonated, his work as a journalist, mine as a veterinary epidemiologist, all over the world, wondering if what one did mattered at all, while other people admired your work and thought you were brave...I put myself into all my books, so that when I wrote on epidemics and zoonoses in different parts of the world, I included my own presence, as if that made it more real, gave me greater credibility...not sure.
April 22, 2024
It got lost halfway through. Glad he found solace from the rabbit hole into his past and came to a conclusion that allowed him to keep going.
“So now he had, after all, a photograph of himself with Charlotte, from their short time together, a long time ago. It hurt now to think of them all, happy there together, but here was the evidence, a last-minute twist. But what did it prove? We were. That’s all. It was good. And some of us continue. Could any true story end any other way?”
“So now he had, after all, a photograph of himself with Charlotte, from their short time together, a long time ago. It hurt now to think of them all, happy there together, but here was the evidence, a last-minute twist. But what did it prove? We were. That’s all. It was good. And some of us continue. Could any true story end any other way?”
April 26, 2022
This was a wide-ranging narrative memoir written, unusually, in the third person for reasons which are explained and which relate to a previous career reporting from conflict zones. The trigger was how affected he was by the death of an old friend (it is she who has the last good funeral of the year - for after that comes the 2020 pandemic lockdown) Between the voice and the changes and my unfamiliarity with his journalism or novels, it somehow came across as beautiful, interesting but ephemeral.
March 17, 2025
in Ireland you don’t just go to funerals for the dead, you go for the survivors, to show that you’re still there
This was achingly beautiful in parts but lost me in others, ngl. Still, the writing is lovely and I'm glad I gave a chance to something I wouldn't usually read. 3.5 stars rounded up
This was achingly beautiful in parts but lost me in others, ngl. Still, the writing is lovely and I'm glad I gave a chance to something I wouldn't usually read. 3.5 stars rounded up
January 14, 2024
I didn't realize this was a memoir at first; the writing has that beautiful, haunting spare Irish quality that lead me to think we were about to hear a story. I began wondering where it all was going . . . and then realized, O'Loughlin was writing about himself. A lovely book.
January 24, 2022
Parts of this was excellent, but I guess it needs something that ties it all together.
https://elifthereader.com/books/the-l...
https://elifthereader.com/books/the-l...
April 1, 2022
It was ok, if you like wandering mid-life crisis novels.
November 1, 2022
Brutally frank, insightful, funny, moving.
December 11, 2022
I thought the early chapters about his friends were compelling and moving.
March 12, 2023
Im not sure what I think overall but as a journalist dime of the passages really resonated with me
December 3, 2023
I found this mixed. The first chapter was very good but the third one was highly qquestionable, especially the bit where the author wonders whether he could win a fight with a swan. swans are ******* crazy, leave them alone.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews