The Undertaking

by Thomas Lynch

  More praise for The Undertaking

  “[Lynch] brings the lessons of death to life, and turns life and death into art.”

  —Time Out New York

  “The year in literature may not produce a better opening line—‘Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople’—and the rest of The Undertaking lives up to that earthshaking start. … A memoir that is stand-out superb even in an era thick with first personages.”

  —Esquire

  “Lynch’s essays are consistently humane and observant of the tragic, humorous, and occasionally startling vagaries of human life…. Highly recommended reading for fans of poetry, Ireland, funeral and cultural customs, or anything else. More than a study of ‘the dismal trade,’ it is a long view of what it means to be human.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “[An] unusual and affecting book. Lynch writes beautifully and affectingly…. Each of the book’s chapters … enchants and instructs while enlightening us in the ways of living, dying, and most important, in Lynch’s anything-but-dismal view, loving.”

  —Elle

  “He is able to take us inside the palpable business of blood, tears, and the final verse of life in a manner that is almost shocking in the relief it delivers. … [A] fine, sensible, and wise book.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “[Lynch] devotes most of his finely composed pages to gently humorous and unabashedly affectionate portraits of the people he loves.… [A] collection of powerful and cadenced essays.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Remarkable … [Lynch] writes in a disarmingly wry and tender way.”

  —Utne Reader

  Also by Thomas Lynch

  Skating with Heather Grace

  Grimalkin & Other Poems

  Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

  THE UNDERTAKING

  Thomas Lynch

  This book is for Dan, Pat, Tim, Mary, Julie, Eddie, Chris, and Brigid

  In Memory of Our Parents Rosemary O’Hara and Edward Joseph Lynch

  Now there is no more catching one’s own eye in the mirror,

  The poor we no longer have with us. Our calm hearts strike only the hour,

  and God, as promised, proves to be mercy clothed in light.

  —JANE KENYON

  1948-1995

  Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

  —VIRGIL

  70-19 B.C.

  And I swear that I don’t have a gun. No I don’t have a gun.

  —KURT D. COBAIN

  1967-1994

  I chose the Vermont Hardwood, dark and shiny. At calling hours we said that her mouth was wrong. It was a comfort, I suppose.

  —DONALD HALL

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks are due to John Lanchester of The London Review of Books and Alexandra Ringe of Harper’s for the early publication of several of the essays that appear in this collection. To Gordon Lish, who published my first poems and essays, I owe permanent thanks. As I do to Jill Bialosky at W. W. Norton whose trust in and efforts on behalf of this manuscript have brought it into being.

  I shall always be in arrears in my indebtedness to Robin Robertson at Jonathan Cape, well met in Dublin in the Spring of 1989, who has edited my poems and who first suggested a book of this type over raw fish in London a few years ago.

  Likewise, I am grateful to my agent, Richard P. McDonough, for his championship of this manuscript and his loyalty and friendship.

  Thanks also to the men and women at Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors with whom I work. Their dedication and professionalism have afforded me the time to complete this book. Especial thanks are due to my brother Edward, whose duties have redoubled in my absences. He is, like the man he was named for, a true caregiver, a good and decent man. I am grateful, also, to my neighbors and friends in Highland Township and Milford, Michigan, for entrusting to our family, for nearly twenty-five years now, the care of their families in difficult times. By sharing with me the details of their lives and deaths, they have made me aware of just how precious we are to one another. In the preparation of these essays, I have been keenly aware of the obligation to respect their privacy. Thus, some of the events and characters recorded here are composites, cominglings—truths renamed, reshaped, refaced, but finally told, in ways that protect the trust they’ve given me.

  For related reasons, I am ever in the debt of writers and friends, Irish, English, Scots, and Americans, who have let me write, sometimes fast and loose, about our friendships.

  I am thankful to Pat Lynch, Mary Howell, Melissa Weisberg, Audrey Kowalski, and Fr. Matthew Lawrence, each of whom read and gave valuable commentary on this manuscript in its making.

  To Karen O’Connor of WGBH in Boston and the office of the Oakland County Medical Examiner, I am indebted for material mentioned in Uncle Eddie, Inc. Also, to Ron Willis, cemetery sexton and thinking man, I owe thanks for his willingness and ability to take the other side of any argument, without which my own would never approach clarity.

  To my daughter, Heather Grace, and my sons Tom, Mike, and Sean, I am ever beholden for their patience, enduring, as they do, draft after draft of a work in progress.

  No vocabulary of thanks and praise includes the words sufficient for what I owe to Mary Tata who has known this text from the very first.

  Preface

  At first I thought it meant he took them under. It was the fifties and I was the child, one of several as it turned out, of an undertaker. This was a fact of greater matter to the kids I hung out with than to me.

  “What does he do?” one would ask. “How does he do it?”

  I said I thought it had to do with holes, with digging holes. And there were bodies involved. Dead bodies.

  “He takes them under. Get it? Under ground.”

  This would usually shut them up.

  Still, I wasn’t as certain as I tried to sound. And I wondered why it wasn’t underputter—you know, for the one who puts them underground. Surely to take them seemed a bit excessive. I mean if they were dead. They wouldn’t need the company on the way. Like you would take your sister to the drug store but you would put your bike in the garage. I loved the play of words and the meanings of them.

  At seven I was sent to learn the Latin required of an altar boy. It was my mother’s idea. She said if I was stingy with God, God would be stingy with me. This had the ring, if not of truth, then of my mother’s will, which was, to me, the nearest thing to truth. The Latin was magic and mysterious—the acoustics made rich by its abundant vowels. Every Tuesday at four o’clock I’d meet with Fr. Kenny from St. Columban’s to learn the ancient syllables by heart. He’d given me a card with the priest’s part in red and my part in black. He had come from Ireland and had been at seminary with my father’s uncle: a priest who died young of tuberculosis, after whom I was named. I was vaguely aware of a conspiracy hatched between my mother and Fr. Kenny that would eventuate in my ordination. I heard a full confession of the particulars from Fr. Kenny himself, years later, after he’d retired and returned to Salthill in Galway. The world and the church had changed too much for him.

  I remember him meeting my father at the back of church. I was always released from school to serve the funerals. My father, impeccable in morning dress, the pallbearers—gloved and boutonniered—the brown casket, the sniffling family and friends behind it.

  They’d changed the vestments from black to white. Englished everything. Revised the rules. Fr. Kenny did not approve of change.

  “Edward” he bellowed when he reached the back, “I’m told we are to celebrate this funeral. So wipe the solemn fellow off your face and kindly instruct Mrs. Grimaldi that the Cardinal expects her to cheer up for her husband’s funeral.”

  The Grima
ldi entourage, accustomed to Fr. Kenny’s sarcasm, looked anything but in the mood.

  I stood, cassocked and surpliced between the priest and my father, holding the bucket of holy water.

  “Next thing you know we’ll be grieving the baptisms …,” Fr. Kenny was warming to his theme.

  “Time now, Father,” my father said.

  Then the priest, looking indignant in his white chasuble, sprinkled the casket with holy water and turned toward the altar where the organist had begun some upbeat number from the new hymnal. Fr. Kenny hushed him with a hard glance, breathed deeply through his nostrils, and intoned the doleful comforts of In Paradisum in the sad tenor he had brought from home.

  He knew that nothing would ever be the same.

  By such instructions I had come to know that the undertaking that my father did had less to do with what was done to the dead and more to do with what the living did about the fact of life that people died.

  In the wordsmithing of the day, new names for what he did were made.

  Mortician he could not abide because it made it sound like something scientific or new-fangled, like the cars and TVs and appliances, perennially repackaged, renewed, and improved.

  Funeral director sounded sensible. He had all the signs changed from Funeral Home to Funeral Directors, believing that it was the people, not the place, that folks in trouble counted on.

  But in the mirror he saw an undertaker—someone who stood with the living confronted with death and pledged to do whatever could be done about it. The undertaking was nothing new. It was as old, he figured, as life itself.

  My pals still wanted grim details.

  “The facts …,” as Joe Friday always said, “just the facts.”

  And so we huddled with my father’s Gray’s Anatomy and Bell’s Pathology—books he’d bought in mortuary school—wincing over pictures of disfigurement, disease, and death the way we would later with pornography.

  But the facts were largely disappointing. No one sat up in their caskets. No one had seen a ghost. I hadn’t noticed if fingernails or hair continued to grow. Rigor mortis wasn’t all that special. The dead were unremarkable in ways that were hard to imagine.

  Not so the living. Not so the glossy women in the girlie mags. Not so the life that seemed more wondrous and more monstrous as we came of age.

  Maybe it is so for every generation—that sex and death are the required lessons.

  My parents, ever sweethearts, graduated high school in time for World War II. My mother went to college and worked in a hospital. My father went with the First Marines to the South Pacific, then to China, then home when it was over. Their world seemed full of possibilities. Their sexuality, sharpened by hunger and the brush with death, put off by threats of pregnancy, postponed by war, found its blossom in the Baby Boom. Sex and death for them were antonyms. Straight shooters and villains, virgins and whores, the right and the wrong crowd—the pictures we have of them are black and white. Known for their romance and fidelities, the children of great wars and great depression hankered for security, safety, and permanence, wise investments and a piece of the rock. They married forever, moved to the suburbs, and lived as if they never had to die.

  My generation, those boomers, born with the nuclear gun to its head, raised with it cocked in Cuba and Berlin, saw love and death like cartoons on TV. We watched the sky. We watched the news. We played in bomb-shelters. And just as we were getting out of or going into puberty, the hammer dropped on Kennedy. That Thursday in high school or in junior high we turned from fantasies of chests and pelvises, the bright new body parts of our youth and desires, to consider the first death in our lives that took. Was it this coincidence of sex and death, of creative and deadly forces in our lives that made our lives and deaths seem random after that? Spontaneous, casual, unpredictable, disconnected from our gravity, we grabbed all the gusto we could get. We only were going round once in this life. If we couldn’t be with the one we loved, honey, we loved the one we were with. Then and now we age with the grace (in Cummings’ careful metaphor) of polar bears on rollerskates. Wary of being caught unawares, we planned our parenthood, committed to trial marriages with pre-nuptials, and pre-arranged our parents’ funerals—convinced we could pre-feel the feelings that we have heard attend new life, true love, and death. And for all our planning, for all our micromanagement, for all our yammering about our parents’ mistakes, we abort more, divorce more, and soon will kevork more than any twenty generations on the globe before us. (The verb form of kevorkian, which proceeds from the infinitive “to kevork” should observe the usage guides applied, in practice, to the other high-volume verb of our generation—a verb I never, as a matter of style, deploy whenever lesser words will do, in the hopes that it, unlike certain antibiotics, will maintain its punch—to wit: “kevork off” or “go kevork yourself” or “take that you mother-kevorker” or in the rhetorical “are you out of your kevorking mind?”)

  But for my daughter and my sons, I fear that sex and death are nearly synonyms. They rhyme too well to be that far removed. Sex is, for them, an odd game of roulette, a deadly lotto on which we figure odds for safe, safer, and safest sex (which is the name we give to none). And death for them? A kind of yawner—a little excitement for those who can’t be shocked. A lapse of caution in which full and fatal contact is finally made. Is safe that much better than sorry? Really? Wow! Kurt Cobain grins at them on the wall. “I wonder if he felt it,” someone says.

  They inhabit a world so rich in technology that everything works better, even the people, but no one seems to know exactly why. Parented by proxy and prescription and by cable TV, they have achieved the loneliness their elders pursued. They enter their twenties less interested in finding themselves than in finding the way out. Faithless, hopeless, untutored in love, they make babies for the sake of company and kill themselves with unspeakable violence in staggering numbers—suffering from a deficiency in meaning acquired from pop culture, pop psychology, feel-good religion, that tells them don’t worry, be happy, take care of yourself and your self-esteem. They stand to inherit, along with the spiritual void their parents have left them, the bill from the card it was all charged to.

  Watching my parents, I watched the meaning change, of what it was that undertakers do: From something done with the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living—everyone of us.

  After high school, I registered for the draft, enrolled in a college, and waited for life to happen to me. I worked at the funeral home. I worked at the state asylum. I worked at a home for alcoholic priests. I learned to drink. I fell in love. Friends of mine had died in Vietnam. The possibilities seemed frightening.

  I went to Ireland. I lived in the house my great-grandfather left a century before to come to Michigan. No phone or furnace, no plumbing or TV, no tractor or car or convenience store—the life led there seemed elemental, nearer the edges, clarified. Cows calved, neighbors died, the tidal ocean rose and fell, folks talked.

  That winter and spring on the west coast of Clare my life and times began to make some sense. And though this weary century of change is having its way with even Ireland now, I return to that place as one does to a well, a source, for the sense that it gives me of something true.

  Thus, undertakings are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisy blather, and the blinding dark. It is the voice we give to wonderment, to pain, to love and desire, anger and outrage; the words that we shape into song and prayer.

  When I first wrote and published poems, my father asked me when I’d write a book about funerals. I said I thought I had already. He nodded, smiled. Every so often he’d ask me again. “You know what I mean,” he said. I did, of course. I’d write the book sometime.

  And much was made, in my books’ reviews, about the odd day job—as if to say, not bad for an embalmer. “Mortician/ Poet” or “Poet/Undertaker” became the standard references. The bold print labored to catch the rea
der’s eye: “A Corpus of Corpses” claimed the Observer. “Come Into My Parlour” said the TLS. The Washington Post read “Poetry Comes Down to Earth.” I did not object too much to this. Nice to be noticed, I told myself, even if mainly as a dancing bear. Truth told I thought the poets I knew who taught in universities or worked in the “related” fields were undertaking too—looking for meaning and voices in life and love and death. Asked why he wrote so many elegiac poems, Seamus Heaney asked if there were any poems at all, besides the elegiac ones. “Sex and death,” Yeats wrote to Pound or Pound to Yeats, I can’t remember now, “are the only subjects poets should write about.” Sex was lovely, the dead were everywhere. Was it any different, I asked myself, for poets-slash-English professors or poets-slash-editors or poets-slash-homemakers or poets-slashdads?

  Which undertaking is it then that does not seek to make some sense of life and living, dying and the dead?

  Still, my father’s question was a real one. He knew how it had informed his life, shaped it, made him the husband and father and man that he was. He knew how the grief of others, the indifference of others, the despair of others, their faith and hope, the way they bought caskets and held one another, the way they sent flowers and said goodbye, how they wept and laughed and drank and ran from it, had told him something about himself, his nature, his species, and his God. I think he knew, when I moved to Milford, twenty-two years ago today, that it would shape and change and inform my life as well.