Died or Passed away?

i hope they remembered not to pay the ferryman until he got them to the other side?

You are born, you die.

You were born, you died.

The Irish have always done death pretty well, IMHO, direct, honest, embracing, celebratory, sympathetically. We put the person's dead body in the middle of a room and we laugh and we cry and we tell stories and we eat and drink and mark the life they lived as well as the occasion of their death.

Who wouldn't want all their loved ones to surround them and do that?

He 'passed away', sounds like something you do when approaching a roundabout, not a death.

How we die is as least as important as how we've lived, so lets not pretend that it is anything other than what it is, death, the end of our mortal lives. Probably the end of existence.

I don't want to pass away, I want to be honest with everyone, and die.

I sometimes like to refer to someone who has passed as, such and such has become an ex-person.

Time and place.

This is it really, though unlike Mrs. OB, I only wish I could have been more restrained when my father in front of an audience in the hospital informed me that my brother who had been ill for some time, was gone. I took no notice of his use of euphemisms, it was the “it’s all part of Gods plan” that had me retort “that sounds like a shìt plan!” I would’ve deserved a smack in the chops for it. Given the circumstances my father didn’t deserve that.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet at least. My wife wasn’t so lucky, and some years later when she called me one day in a distraught state, it took me a few minutes to calm her down to ask her what was wrong. “Your fathers dead!” she said, “Oh thank goodness” I replied, before quickly adding that I thought something had happened to our son (who had been born two weeks earlier).

I only hope that when the time of my departure comes, circumstances will allow my son a quiet moment to ourselves to slip a hand behind my head and whisper “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him”, knowing it’s what I would have wanted - to be remembered as the jester, not the knave (no need to go avenging my death either).

Fuair sé; he got, but also he found

Fuair sé bás; He found death

I prefer the latter

The Irish language always seems to have much nicer ways to express things

I dodged a bullet in many respects with that one!

Ah sure we all say things sometimes - my brother offered to take the graveyard shift when we were waking my dad. We still laugh about that one. Slipped out without thinking. And that is what is great about Ireland & how we deal with grief, it's not just one level - it's funny comments, it's laughing, it's slagging off the person (as long as they haven't died in an accident or very young of course), it's crying.

I remember gently ushering some people out from the room my dad was laid out in because as my mam put it "they're praying over him again, if we're not careful, he'll come back & smack them". I'd say the line you said to your dad probably was something he was already thinking when he said about God's plan. Because it does suck a bit. If it exists at all.

The convention is to say passed away when it very recently happened, but you wouldn't say passed away 10 years, then you'd say they died. Passed away is just a bit more sensitive to those who haven't yet taken it in. So which to use depend on the time context. You can say your ma just kicked the bucket if you like but you might get funny looks.

How can it be disrespectful to the person who died, to say they died? Its a fact, it happened, there is nothing clearer. Its not slang, not a slur, not an insult, its simply saying the truth. The person is dead so they are not going to be upset what you say. The family will have the sadness and shock of the death, the laying out of the person, the wake, the choosing the coffin, preparing the funeral, the grief, so they are well aware the person has died and they will not be put out what you say.

I hope when I died people will say I died, not passed.