by Thomas Lynch
When I first beheld, as a student in mortuary school, Plates 60 and 61 in Book Five of De humani corporis fabrica libri septum (The Fabric of the Human Body) by the great sixteenth-century physician and anatomist, Andreas Vesalius, I was smitten with ontological and existential awe. A disciple of the first-century Greek philosopher and medico, Galen of Pergamon, one sees in the Belgian’s handiwork the male gaze on female parts he examines at autopsy and vivisection. There is such tenderness in the splayed cavity and skinned breast of the headless woman of his scrutiny, such precision to his illustrations of her innards.
By then I’d had a rudimentary acquaintance with the bodies of women. I knew what to touch and rub, fondle and savor, hug and hold, loosen and let go, lave and graze. But the frank exposure of the human fabric that Vesalius’s images detailed were wondrous to me, unveiling as they do, apocalyptically, the beauty of both form and function. Had I not found his drawings so sumptuously instructive—corresponding as they did to the focus of my own gobsmacked gaze—I might have considered then what I consider now, here in my age and anecdotage, to wit, the notion that, though each gender has its own specific parts to play in our species’ drama of “reproduction,” such issues are neither male nor female solely. Rather, they are human in scope and nature, requiring, in both meaning and performance, the two it always takes to tango. We are, it turns out, in this together.
Still, it is impossible to behold a woman’s parts without gratitude and awe. Likewise I am often chuffed—a word that means both one thing and its opposite—by the sense such encounters invariably include that we are all, in fact, the same but different; the anatomists’ renderings of our private parts show the male member is nothing so much as a vagina turned inside out, so that the adventitia, smooth muscle and mucosa of the latter reflect, actually, the phallic urgency of the former, almost as if they were made for each other, bespoke, custom fit—like sword to scabbard, hand to glove, preacher to pulpit or corpse to opened ground.
And, lest any man assume the sword more salient than the scabbard, consider science, that great leveler:
In utero, we all start as female and only the random happenstance of the Y chromosome and its attendant hormones makes some of us male. Still, testes are unambiguously fallen ovaries and the scrotal raphe a labial scar from the fusion of one’s formerly female lips. The penis is a clitoris writ large, the nipples sans lactating, ornaments for men to remind them of the truth they are mostly boobs that do not work. So, whether penetration, ejaculation, ovulation, uterine contraction, fertilization or gestation seals the reproductive deal, each is essential to this essential mystery, we are brought into being by the fervent collaboration of both male and female. Science provides stand-ins for the stallion and sire. “They bring the bull in a suitcase, now,” my cousin Nora in West Clare informed me years ago, speaking of her small troupe of milking Friesians, which had a withering effect on my rampant mannishness. Men are easily made redundant, but female mammals still do the heavy bearing. Far from the second, weaker sex, the female seems the first and fiercest, like poetry to language, the one without which nothing happens.
I WENT FOR stillborn babies, as a boy. Well not a boy, exactly, but not yet a man. My apprenticeship to my father’s business meant I’d go to hospitals to get the tiny lifeless bodies, transported in a small black box, such as one might take fishing or to keep one’s tools. I’d return them to the funeral home: wee incubates in various stages of incompleteness and becoming. Sometimes they were so perfectly formed in miniature that they seemed like tiny icons of humanity, their toes and fingers, noses and eyes, their little selves too small, too still, but otherwise perfectly shaped and made. As with Galen and Vesalius, as with Wallace Stevens, the thing itself outweighs the idea of the thing. Thus these little fetal things, stillborn or born but not quite viable, were freighted with a gravitas, fraught with sadness, laden with a desolation born of dashed hopes and grave-bound humanity. The body, the incarnate thing, is critical to our understanding. The uterus is wellspring, headwater, home ground of our being.
In time I’d learn to sit with the families of dead fetuses, dead toddlers, dead teenagers—the parents who’d outlived the ones they’d made, the fathers who remembered the night of bliss they’d had, the kissing and embraces, the mothers who recalled their first intuitions of gravity, their gravidness, its gravitas, the grave consequences of impregnation—an ill-at-easeness in their lower core, tenderness in the breast, the momentary hot flash of a future changed or changing utterly.
“It’s only been maybe a hundred years,” says my young assistant, halfway through her childbearing years, “that women have actually owned their uteri.” And even now, she adds, the agency of men—of husbands and fathers, bishops and politicos, no less moguls and marketers—have too much a say in what goes on in the hidden places of a woman’s body, the womb and its attendant, adjacent parts: cervix, ovaries, fallopian tubes, adventitia, clitoris, labia major and minor, mons pubis, all of which conspire, as it were, to raise a chorus of praise to the mighty nature whereby we renew, repeat, reproduce and replicate ourselves.
In the panel Eve Tempted by the Serpent by Defendente Ferrari, who was painting in Turin while Vesalius was dissecting in Padua, the pale-skinned, naked teenager’s mons veneris is obscured by the filigree leaf frond of the sapling she is plucking an apple from—the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The leering, bearded, lecherous, old-mannish-faced snake, slithering up the adjacent tree, is hissing his temptation in her ear. It is the last moment of Paradise, the girl is her girlish innocence, oblivious to the ramifications, her genitalia, her tiny breasts, her consort’s parts are not yet shameful. Time will eventually blame everything on her: the Fall of Man, the pain of childbirth, the provocations of her irrepressible beauty, death itself. But for now, God is still happy with Creation. He has looked about and seen that it was good. It’s all written down in Genesis 3. The diptych panel with Adam, perhaps erect and prelapsarian, has been lost to the centuries, so we do not see how happy he is, how willing and ready and grateful he is for her succor and company, her constancy.
IT WAS A drizzling morning in the winter of 1882, in Washington, D.C.; a retinue of black-clad pilgrims gathered around a small grave in the Congressional Cemetery to bury little Harry Miller, a toddling boy who had succumbed to that season’s contagion of diphtheria. The small coffin rested on the ropes and boards over the open ground while the mother’s sobs worked their way into a rising crescendo. The undertaker nodded to the man at the head of the grave to begin. He shook his head. The mother’s animal sobs continued. She was bent over, like someone stabbed, wrapping her small arms round her uncorseted middle, holding herself together by dint of will at the point in her body where she felt the blade of her bereavement most keenly.
“Does Mrs. Miller desire it?” the speaker asked. The dead boy’s father nodded his assent.
The officiant on the day was Robert Green Ingersoll, the most notorious disbeliever of his time, his age’s Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher. Though stridently unchurched, Ingersoll was the son of the manse, the youngest son of a Congregationalist minister who preached his abolitionist views and had, as a consequence, been given his walking papers by congregants around the East and Midwest. Robert spent most of his youth shifting from church to church because of his father’s politics. Because of his father’s mistreatment at the hands of Congregationalists, Robert turned first on Calvinism and then on Christianity and, by the time he stepped to the head of the grave that rainy morning in Washington, D.C., he was the best known infidel in America—an orator and lecturer who had traveled the country upholding humanism, “free thinking and honest talk” and making goats of religionists and their ecclesiastical up-lines.
“Preaching to bishops,” a priest of my acquaintance once told me, “is like farting at skunks.” And I wonder now if he wasn’t quoting Robert Ingersoll. As he stepped to the head of the Miller boy’s burial site, Ingersoll began his oration.
I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I wish to take from every grave its fear. From the wondrous tree of life the buds and blossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth, patriarchs and babes sleep side by side.
Every cradle asks us “Whence?” and every coffin “Whither?”
They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear.
We have no fear. We are all children of the same mother, and the same fate awaits us all.
We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living, hope for the dead.
Help for the living. Hope for the dead.
EVERY CRADLE ASKS us whence indeed, and every coffin whither. The abyss we consign our dead to—opened ground or fire, pond or sea or air—is incubation of a sort our sacred texts make faith claims for, hoping they are like the space, pear-shaped sometimes, no more than centimeters, hormonally engaged, impregnated by mighty nature—a primal station in the journey of our being.
WHAT BENT THE dead boy’s mother over was the grief, felt most keenly in her most hidden places, the good earthen, opened seedbed of her uterus, vacated with pushing and with pain, and vanquished utterly by her child’s death. It is the desolation Eve must have felt when one of her sons killed the other. And the wonder Andreas Vesalius beheld when looking into the bloody entrails of the Paduan girl who first unveiled for him the mystery of our coming into being, and by the sound and sense we humans get, examining our lexicon, that “grave” and “gravid” share their page and etymology, no less gravitas and gravity, “grace” and “gratitude.” And that the surest human rhymes of all are “womb” and “tomb.”
THE DONE THING
By getting the dead where they need to go, the living get where they need to be. This seems, after half a century of undertaking, the essential brief, the task most manifest, the raison d’être for a funeral. If these outcomes are not accomplished, whatever else takes place, however pleasant or wretched, meager or sumptuous, is of no real consequence. The accessories amount to nothing—the requiems and mum plants, the shaky brace of pallbearers, coffin plates and monuments, five stages of grief, seven deadly sins, ten commandments, umpteen eschatologies and apostasies—if the essential job’s not done, the rest is senseless. To deal with death we must deal with our dead, to get our riddance of the corpse, beloved though it might be, and get ourselves to the edge of the life we will be living without them. And this is coded in our humanity: when one of our kind dies, something has to be done about it, and what that something becomes, with practice and repetition, with modifications and revisions, is the done thing by which we make our stand against this stubborn fact of life—we die.
By bearing the dead to their abyss, by going that distance, the living hope to bear the loss of them. By processing the mortal remains, we endeavor to process mortality’s burdens and heartbreaks. This amalgam of corporal and spiritual works, an effort to deal with the manifest and mysterious life, has been the work that separates humanity from the other animals.
And here some sort of motion, some movement and tasking, some shifting of conditions and circumstance are implicated. Where, the discerning reader will likely wonder, do the dead need to go? Where indeed! Let me say that what the dead most need, in the moment of their death, is to be gotten, coincident perhaps with hurried and heartfelt farewells, en route to their riddance, their oblivion and abyss, whatever form it takes—the ground, the fire, the sea or air—that elemental disposition that ensures they will not embarrass themselves further by putrefaction or decomposition or any of the postmortem indignities that creatures of bone and blood and meat are prone to. Whereas the mother of Jesus was assumed into heaven, a feast in mid-August in the Western church, most of us will find the opened ground or the chambered fire or tomb sufficient to the task of final disposition, a word the etymologist will inform proceeds from dispose, which itself proceeds from the Latin disponere meaning “arrange,” influenced by dispositus “arranged” and Old French poser “to place.” Which is to say, we must arrange to place them elsewhere, thus the shoulder and shovel work, the pecking birds that pick the dead thing clean of its rot, the fire, the depths, the tree’s high branches: each an end of the done thing somewhere. There are others, we know, but in their final dispositions they are all the same.
I FIRST LANDED in Clare on February 3, 1970. The inky, oval welcome in my first passport has long since dried; still, I get a glimpse of it again every time I pass through Shannon or Dublin now, as I’ve done many dozens of times in the intervening years, going on half a century now, though we don’t feel the time going.
The man in the customs hall in Shannon chalked an X on my bag and waved me on saying, “The name’s good.” I was twenty-one and possessed of a high number in the Nixon draft lottery—a surreal exercise in the existential that had been drawn a couple months before, giving me a pass on becoming fodder for the American misadventure in Vietnam. A lackluster student without goals or direction, I thought I’d better make a move, a gesture to put some distance between my effortless mediocrity at school and my parents’ scrutiny. I’d read Yeats and Joyce and reckoned to reconnect with what remained of our family, “on the banks of the River Shannon,” as my grandfather had always prayed over Sunday dinners throughout my youth. His widow, my grandmother, a Dutch Methodist who converted to “the one true faith,” as she called the idolatrous superstitions of the crowd she’d married into, still sent Christmas greetings to “Tommy and Nora Lynch, Moveen West Kilkee Co Clare,” which is what I told the taximan in the big Ford idling outside the arrivals hall.
“Can you take me here?” I asked him, proffering the places and names scribbled in my grandmother’s sturdy cursive.
I REMEMBER NORA LYNCH, nearly seventy then, in the doorway of her home, shoulder leaning into the jamb, arms crossed, a study in contemplation, figuring to what use she might put this young Yank on his holidays. Her brother, Tommy, was holding back the snarling dog. I was dressed like a banker’s apprentice in my one black suit, polished wing tips and my dead grandfather’s watch fob, trying to make a good first impression, a little hung over from the drinks on the plane and the compression of a night crossing. And, despite my efforts, I was as disappointing a Yank as ever showed up in Clare, without property or prospects, cash or complete education. I had Yeats’s Collected Poems and Joyce’s The Dubliners. They had a newly wallpapered room with a narrow bed and a straight-back chair.
I was their first American cousin to return; they were my Irish connections, twice removed.
“Come in,” she said, “you’re perished with the journey. Sit in by the fire. We’ll make the tea.”
Nora and her brother were living on the edge—of Ireland and County Clare to be sure; the north Atlantic just over the road, the Shannon estuary below. Likewise they were, late in their sixties, at the narrowing edge of the lives they’d been given in the opening decade of the twentieth century. First cousins of my late grandfather, to my twenty-one-year-old self they seemed relics of another time entirely, Bruegel-esque, premodern, ever, as Yeats claimed, “the indomitable Irishry.”
Nora could not have seen her brother’s death, of pneumonia, coming around the corner of another year, nor her own long and lonesome vigil by the fire that would come to a close twenty-two years hence. She could not see the trips she would make to Michigan or my many returns to Moveen, nor the family, immediate and extended, who would, in the fullness of time, make the trip “home” with me. All of it was the mystery the future always is, rhyming as it does with the history of the past. The moment we’re in is a gift, the bromide holds, that’s why we call it the “present.”
And in that moment, that gray, midwinter Tuesday morning in the yard in Moveen, gift that the present tense of it was, I could not see how it would change my life, to have followed the frayed thread of family connection back to its source and headwaters to this distant townland of Moveen West, a thousand acres divided by families and hedgerows and ditches, the
open palm of treeless green pastureland, dotted with shelters and stone sheds, hay barns and outbuildings, stretching from the high cliffs edging the Atlantic down-land to the gray, shingly banks of the Shannon estuary.
IN TIME I would learn all the place names, find the wells and scenic routes, flora and fauna, the mythic and epic accounts of things—how Loop Head was named for the mighty leap the Hound of Ulster, Cuchulain, made with Mal the Hag in hot and lecherous pursuit of him; how the Montbretia that blooms up the boreens and ditch banks, coast roads and villagescapes, through July and August leaped over the stone walls of the Vandeleur land lords’ walled estate in Kilrush like liberty itself, like water, escaping every effort to keep it in, propagating by mighty nature, a new reality.
THE LEAPS AND tributaries of reconnections that I pursued all those years ago were bound to place and people and the ties that bind. In Tommy and Nora I found the last and steadfast remnant of a family sept that had remained while others sailed out of Kappa Pier in Kilrush and Cobh in Cork, a century before when a nineteenth-century Thomas Lynch crossed the Atlantic on a steerage fare and found his way from Clare to Quebec and Montreal, thence to Michigan where he’d heard of a place called Jackson where the largest walled prison in the country was being built and maintained by the unskilled, gainful labor of poor immigrants. “Tom Lynch—Wanted” it read on the tin case he brought his worldly possessions in. He gave that case to his son, who gave it to his son, who gave it years later, now empty, to me.