The Depositions

by Thomas Lynch

  Twinkle, twinkle little star

  Now I lay me down to sleep

  ABCDEFG

  God is great and God is good,

  let us thank him for this food.

  Irish poets learn your trade

  Earth receive an honored guest

  William Yeats is laid to rest.

  It was William Yeats who wrote in a letter to a woman he was trying to impress that the only subjects of interest to a studious mind were sex and death. How nice for me, I remember thinking in my early twenties, because I was predictably fond of sex, and the dead, as it turned out, were everywhere.

  Thus were the hours spent working wakes and visitations at my father’s funeral home, listening to the colloquies of mourners we met at the door, a daily instruction in the way of things—life and death and the shape of relations that gave them meaning and the rituals that tried to make some sense of the existential mysteries of coming to be and being and ceasing to be.

  “If God speaks to us at all . . . then I think that he speaks to us largely through what happens to us.”7 That’s Frederick Buechner again, in Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO me while working at my father’s funeral home was that folks began to treat me like a hero. They were so grateful when we would show up at the hospital or nursing home or family home in the middle of the night, so grateful for the way we handled their dead carefully and with respect. Or leaving after a long day’s visitation at the funeral home, when a widow would hold me by the shoulders and tell me how very comforting it was to have us parking the cars and holding the doors and taking the coats and casseroles, directing folks to the proper parlor and bringing the flowers and for “just being there.” Or turning from the graveside once everything that could be done had been done, how they would shake my hand or hug me and thank me profusely because “we couldn’t have done this without you . . . thank you. . . . God bless you . . .” or heartfelt words to that effect. Such effusions made me feel useful and capable and helpful, as if I’d accomplished the job well done and all I really did was show up, pitch in, do my part. Before long I began to understand that showing up, being there, helping in an otherwise helpless situation was made heroic by the same gravity I had sensed when I first stood in that embalming room as a boy—the presence of the dead made the presence of the living more meaningful somehow, as if it involved a basic and intuitively human duty to witness.

  By now I was beginning to think about sex and death almost exclusively—the former because I was in my twenties, the latter because, as the son of a funeral director, death and the dead were part of our daily lives. I was twenty-two and casting about for my calling. A high number in the Nixon Draft Lotto had kept me out of Vietnam, my college career had been spent reading poetry and playing cards and traveling back and forth to Ireland and the Continent in search of diversion and direction, I suppose. My younger brother Pat was starting mortuary school that fall and, possibly sensing my dilemma, my father asked if I’d like to go with him to the NFDA convention in Kansas City that year. They convened—nearly five thousand of them from across the country—on Halloween in the Hotel Muehlebach where all the meetings would be held in the Imperial Ballroom. There was to be a dinner on Sunday night with music “by Woody Herman, in concert” for dancing; a “Special Ladies’ Program”; another dinner “with radio and T.V. personality, Art Link­letter!”; the usual sessions to elect officers, conduct association business, and take reports from various committees; and a list of morning educational seminars. There was what they called an “educational display of funeral merchandise and supplies in the Municipal Auditorium” across the street. This display involved more than a hundred manufacturers and suppliers of caskets and hearses and other accessories to the trade: vaults and embalming fluids, printers of holy cards and thank you notes, suits and shrouds and gowns for burial, canned music, candles and plastic flowers, grave markers, flags and insignia—all the stuff that can be bought at wholesale, sold at retail just like books and burgers and pharmaceuticals. There was a deep shine to the limousines and hearses and I remember the odd names of things, “Frigid Fluid” and “Progress Caskets,” “Con-O-Lite” and “Phoenix Embalming.” It was a bit bizarre to be spending Halloween filling our bags with freebees and samples from suppliers to the mortuary trade—yard sticks and tie clips shaped to look like shovels and models of headstones and horse-drawn coaches—something for everybody, trick or treat.

  But the stars of the exhibits were the casket companies: Batesville and National, the biggest and best, and Marsellus, which made the mahogany cabinet President Kennedy had been buried in. Springfield, Aurora, Boyertown, Belmont, and Merit were there along with local and regional jobbers like Artco, Chicago, Missouri, Boyd, Delta, Quincy, Royal, and Flint. Each came with an entourage of salesmen, always smiling and glad-handing, eager to add to their accounts. And each of the caskets had its own name too, “The President” or “Permaseal” or “Praying Hands,” which became a kind of litany of mostly metal caskets in those days, and polished woods, with plush velvet and crepe and satin insides that gave the impression in their collective display that funerals were mostly about the boxes.

  Of course this was precisely the argument that Jessica Mitford had made less than a decade before with the publication of her muckraking classic, The American Way of Death. Because I was his bookish son, my father gave it to me to read when I was fifteen years old and told me to tell him what was in it. I told him I thought the style would earn her a lot of readers and that she would change the way people thought about funerals and that much of what she wrote was true and much of what she wrote missed the point entirely.

  It was on the Feast of All Souls—that Tuesday in convention week—that the stuff began to give way to substance and the ridiculous began to make room for the sublime. That morning, NFDA’s educational consultant, Robert C. Slater, who taught at the mortuary school at the University of Minnesota, arranged for what was called a “Think Tank” of scholars and teachers and clergy, each of whom had served as a consultant to NFDA. Robert Fulton, a sociologist; Dr. Vanderline Pine, a funeral director and sociologist; Dr. William Lamers, a psychiatrist and hospice pioneer; Robert Habenstein, author of Funeral Customs the World Over and The History of American Funeral Service; and Roger Blackwell, the marketing and consumer guru who taught at Ohio State University’s School of Business, were joined by clergy-authors Rabbi Earl Grollman, Pastor Paul Irion, and Reverend Edgar Jackson, along with NFDA’s Howard C. Raether and Robert Slater, to carry on an open discussion about the place of the funeral and the funeral director in American culture. Much of the discussion was shaped by questions from the more than 1,200 funeral directors in the ballroom. It was the best-attended session of the convention. These were writers and thinkers and professors and preachers and, in ways that casket salesmen were not, these were men of studious minds whose version of my father’s work was much more serious than the cartoon that Jessica Mitford and the display of mortuary goods across the street would give one to believe. If psychologists, sociologists, consumer gurus, statisticians, the reverend clergy, and historians all found the funeral worthy of study, possibly the literary and mortuary arts could be commingled. And their topic was the funeral, as an event unique to humankind, as old as the species. Whereas the exhibits across the street proclaimed that the chief product of the mortuary were the cars and caskets and vaults and urns, piped in music and embalming, this think tank viewed such things as accessories only to the fundamental obligation to assist with the funeral. A death in the family was not a sales op, rather it was an opportunity to serve, in concert with the community of civic and religious, neighborhood and family circles that endeavored to respond to the facts of death.

  “Take care of the service,” I can still hear my father’s good counsel: “and the sales will take care of themselves.”

  That night I told my father I’d be going to mortuary school. Some months later I was enrolled at Wayne State University’s
Department of Mortuary Science. After which I graduated, got my license, and the following year moved to Milford to take up residence in and management of the funeral home that our family purchased to accommodate the growing number of our funeral directors.

  MY FRIEND AND fellow in this book’s endeavor, Thomas G. Long, writes with insight and candor about the changing religious landscape of America and the place of the clergy in a nation that is increasingly secular. The remarkable changes in religious practice over the past half century are coincident with, correlated to, and in many instances, trafficked in cause-and-effect with changes in our mortuary customs. Unlike the clergy who have fallen from great heights of approval, funeral directors have never been generally popular. It is the same with poets. While many people might approve the idea of poetry and are passably glad that there are poets at work, only a fraction of a fraction of the population can tolerate actually having to read a poem. Thus, a funeral director who writes poems is the occupational equivalent of a proctologist with a sideline in root canals. No less a preacher with a specialty in final things. Folks are glad to see us coming when there is pain or trouble, and gladder still to see us gone with their good riddance in tow. It was ever thus.

  Thus, for two such unpopular sorts as my coconspirator and me to take on the toxic and oxymoronic topics of good death, good grief, and good funerals presumes there are others like ourselves for whom such things might be of interest.

  As it often is among writers, I read Thomas G. Long before I met him. He published an article titled “The American Funeral Today—Trends and Issues” in the Director, published by the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA). It was thoroughly original, full of original notions and insights and real scholarship and written in a way that even I could get. Some months later, Mark Higgins, a friend and fellow funeral director from North Carolina, secured for me an e-mail introduction. Reverend Long and I met in New York on the twenty-fifth of June in 1998. I was between stops on a book tour and he was teaching at Princeton then. He picked me up at LaGuardia, took me to lunch in the city, and told me about the project, just underway, which would eventually become Accompany Them with Singing—The Christian Funeral, the most important book on the Christian response since Paul Irion’s The Funeral: Vestige or Value was published in 1977. Our views, shared over salads, arrived at so many of the same conclusions—some provisional, some hard-earned, some in search of replication—from our different vantage points and professional experiences. It is safe to say that the years Dr. Long has spent in ministry and teaching, coincident with the years I have spent in funeral service, have seen more changes in the nation’s religious and mortuary customs and practices than in any generation before.

  We first began working together doing daylong multidisciplinary conferences sponsored by the Michigan Funeral Directors Association for hospice, clergy, and funeral directors. The public relations firm hired by the association to work up some advance publicity advised that we could never get an audience for a conference called “The Good Death, Good Grief, Good Funerals.” They saw it as a triple dose of the dire and dismal. “Think, ‘good war, good plague, good famine,’ ” I distinctly remembered one of them saying. They proffered other more welcoming, heartwarming titles involving health and healing, celebration and memories. But we insisted that people who played on the front line of final things, the ones you would find out in the middle of the night en route to a home where a death had occurred, were among those rare and indispensable local heroes—hospice volunteers, pastors, good neighbors, and funeral directors—who drove towards such trouble rather than away from it. They would understand quite readily, we told the PR firm, what could, in fact, be “good” about death and grief and funerals. And they knew what could be bad. It is just such an audience this book hopes to find, those local heroes who ante up the power of their presence, their words that ring true, the quiet they can keep through the difficult vigils, and all they have learned of compassion, in service to their fellow pilgrims among the dying, the dead, and the bereaved.

  One more thing: named, as I am, for a sickly priest and a famous doubter, the life of faith for me is constantly in flux. Some days it seems like stating the obvious to say that God is good, whoever she is. Still on others it seems we are entirely alone. Years ago I quit going to church on Sunday. I found myself second-guessing the sermons and the society of it all. It is a character flaw of mine, I readily confess. But compared to what I had seen and heard at funerals, when faith and hope and love are really up for grabs, the Sunday routine seemed, well, routine. When there’s a body in the box at the front of the room or the foot of the altar and a family gathered round with a fist about to be shaken in the face of their maker and the reasonable questions about why such sadness and grief always seems to attend this life, that’s when ministers really earn their keep. Baptisms, weddings, Sundays with the full choir and fashions on parade are nothing compared to the courage it takes to stand between the living and the dead and broker a peace between them and God. And inasmuch as I was going to funerals six days a week and hearing the clergy bring their A-games to them, on Sundays I began going to one of those places where they do twelve steps and smarmy bromides like “one day at a time” and “fake it till you make it,” “let go, let God”—things like that. In the way things happen as they are supposed to happen, I arrived by the grace of Whomever Is in Charge Here at a provisional article of faith, to wit: if there’s a God, it is not me. In the years I’ve been working and writing with Reverend Long, my faith has been emboldened by his own fierce faith. I think it is what we are all called to do: to embolden, encourage, behold, ennoble, instruct, and inspire our fellow humans in troubling times. It’s what Tom Long’s faith does for mine. It is what I hope this book will do.

  FORTY YEARS SINCE deciding, at a conference in Kansas City, to follow my father into funeral service, and two months after addressing in Dublin an international confab of fellow funeral directors, I find myself presenting to several hundred attendees of the Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, in the Cotswalds in greeny England. These are mostly Anglicans and Methodists and seekers after some truth who come for a long bank holiday weekend to listen to Christian rock music and talks by poets and priests, the lapsed and beleaguered and devout. After my remarks, a woman in the audience stands to ask how might we “redeem” the funeral—that is her word—how we might redeem it from its failed and fallen ways.

  Her question is at the heart of this book. And my answer is the same as it was to the funeral directors in Dublin: that we are all called to become local heroes; that the dead and the bereaved are the same but different everywhere, in need of someone who answers the call to show up, pitch in and do their part, to serve the living by caring for the dead; to be what Tom Long calls “undertakers.” Because just as a good death does not belong exclusively to doctors or nurses or hospice workers, nor good grief to therapists, psychologists, or social workers, a good funeral belongs to the species, all of us, not just the clergy and funeral directors. Each of us must reclaim these last things for our own and for each other. Then I thought I’d finish with a poem, so I gave them the one that I was asked to write for undertakers in my country who answered the call to care for the victims and families of the 9-11 attacks. It has come to be for me an homage to the men and women who serve on the front lines of dying, death, and bereavement: the first responders, police and firefighters, doctors and nurses, hospice volunteers and clergy, funeral directors, no less the family, friends, and neighbors. These are the folks who can be counted on in times of trouble; they go out in the middle of the night, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of the weekday and weekend, holiday and holy day. Theirs are kindnesses that can’t be outsourced or off-shored or done online. They are hand-delivered, homemade, deeply human, do-it-yourself. These are the ones whose voices make up the chorus that calls each of us in our own way to serve the living by caring for the dead and they are the ones for whom this book is written.

  LOCAL
HEROES

  Some days the worst that can happen happens.

  The sky falls or evil overwhelms or

  the world as we have come to know it turns

  towards the eventual apocalypse

  long prefigured in all the holy books—

  the end-times of old grudge and grievances

  that bring us each to our oblivions.

  Still, maybe this is not the end at all,

  nor even the beginning of the end.

  Rather, one more in a long list of sorrows

  to be added to the ones thus far endured

  through what we have come to call our history—

  another in that bitter litany

  that we will, if we survive it, have survived.

  God help us who must live through this, alive

  to the terror and open wounds: the heart

  torn, shaken faith, the violent, vengeful soul,

  the nerve exposed, the broken body so

  mingled with its breaking that it’s lost forever.

  Lord send us, in our peril, local heroes.

  Someone to listen, someone to watch, someone

  to search and wait and keep the careful count

  of the dead and missing, the dead and gone

  but not forgotten. Some days all that can be done

  is to salvage one sadness from the mass

  of sadnesses, to bear one body home,

  to lay the dead out among their people,

  organize the flowers and the casseroles,

  write the obits, meet the mourners at the door,

  drive the dark procession down through town,

  toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre.

  It’s what we do. The daylong news is dire—

  full of true believers and politicos,

  bold talk of holy war and photo ops.

  But here, brave men and women pick the pieces up.

  They serve the living, caring for the dead.