In the old Irish wake, grief had a voice and a shape. A bean chaointe, a keening woman, would sing a caoineadh over the body: an improvised, wailing lament that named the dead, praised them, and drew the grief out of everyone in the room. It was skilled work, usually carried by women, and it belonged to a culture that marked the fall turn of the year at Samhain, when the boundary between the living and the dead was said to thin.
From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, the keening was condemned by a Catholic Church that found it too wild and too pagan, and it was suppressed until it nearly disappeared. What replaced it is the grief most of us know now: private, quiet, a little ashamed of its own volume.
It is coming back, carried by people who treat it as a live question about how a culture is allowed to mourn. Deirdre Wadding, who leads keening again in Ireland, describes what the keening woman actually does.
"Keening women basically create a sound that then helps to evoke the family's grief. Seeing ourselves in this long ancestral line, it gives us a sense of legacy."
Deirdre Wadding, keening practitioner
The revival is not nostalgia. A 2025 documentary, Caoineadh, followed the tradition into modern Connemara. The people bringing it back are not staging a museum piece. They are answering a need the suppression never removed: the need for sorrow to have a form and a witness.
I keep it beside the ofrenda in this issue because the two rhyme across an ocean. Both belong to the fall threshold. Both insist the dead deserve a voice rather than silence. And both were, at some point, told by an authority that this was too much, that grief should be managed instead of expressed. Bringing the caoineadh back is its own small act of repair: a tradition of full-throated mourning, honored again after the institutions that shamed it lost their grip.