by Thomas Lynch
“Tom that went,” said Nora Lynch, speaking about the uncle she never knew and handing me a glass of whiskey, “and Tom that would come back. So, now for you.” She admired the circularity of time and happenstance. The way what goes around, etcetera.
AND NODDING BY the fire after the welcome and the whiskey and the talk, so brogue-twisted and idiomatically rich, I began to feel the press of hitherto unknown forces—cultural, religious, familial and new—like Dorothy in Oz, I was a long way from Michigan and suddenly and certainly home.
It changed my life, those next three months hunkered over the sods, observing lives lived nearer the essential edge of things, keeping body and soul together, making sense of the elementals, the social and seasonal nuances, the register of imaginative and emotional dynamics, the stories and poems and songs and performances that everyone brought to the evenings’ “cuirt”—that gathering of neighbors around hearth and table, each with a party piece, a pound cake, tobacco or drink to add to the evenings’ effort to give thanks for another day that was in it. I belonged to a culture of isolates who gathered around our individual, glowing screens to connect with virtual realities. Tommy and Nora lived actual lives on life’s terms, which included both the gossip and the goodwill of neighbors, come what may. This was a time before country people could escape the contingencies of their geography, before the Fords and Vauxhalls lengthened their range of travel. In 1970 the ties that bind could only be slipped so far as “shanks’ mare” or the Raleigh bike, the pony trap or ass and cart could take them. They married over the ditch, caroused within the townland or village, got their sacraments within the parish bounds and got their income from their hard labor in their land and the local creamery. That I had come from across an ocean many of their people had crossed and never returned, that I spoke with a Midwest American brogue, that I’d experienced things that were different from them made me momentarily a minor celebrity. But only momentarily. After a while I was just Tommy and Nora’s “Yank.”
So when Tommy died the following year, in early March of pneumonia, Nora rode her bike into Kilkee to make the call to let me know. When I showed up the following morning to join the wake in progress in Moveen, it upped the ante of our connection.
“Most Yanks,” a local bromide holds, “wouldn’t give ye the steam off their water.”
So a Yank who comes running at the news of “trouble,” that deftly understated Irishism for a death in the family, seemed to them another thing entirely. But Ireland had taught me things about the ties that bind—the press of family history and place, all the rooted behaviors conditioned over generations.
And when Nora Lynch, in those first months that I spent in West Clare, took me to the graveyard at Moyarta, near the banks of the River Shannon in Carrigaholt, it was to the vaulted grave of our common man and the flagstone cut by Mick Troy with the particulars of a sadness eighty years before I ever landed.
Erected by Pat Lynch [it reads] in memory of his beloved wife, Honor alias Curry who died October 3rd 1889 Aged 62 years may she R.I.P. Amen.
The erector named in the stonecutter’s work was Nora Lynch’s grandfather, my grandfather’s grandfather, thus, my great-great-grandfather, thus, our common man. His wife, Honor, for whom the tomb was built, was a grandniece of the Irish philologist and antiquary, Eugene O’Curry, whence, according to Nora, any later genius in our gene pool. And it was Pat’s wife’s slow dying of a stomach cancer that gave him the time, in cahoots with his brother, Tom, to fashion this stone vault at the western side of the burial ground, with the great graven flagstone to cover it giving the details of his wife’s demise and his grievous love for her. He would follow in the fullness of time, as would his son and heir, Sinon, Nora’s father, as would Nora’s twin brother who died in infancy, and finally Nora, her long lonesome vigil quit in March of 1992, her tiny corpse in its wooden coffin lowered into the stone-lined, opened ground to be comingled with the bones and boxes of her ancestors.
THEY ARE ALL dead now, of course, the bed of heaven to them. And I am long since into that age when the wakes begin to outnumber the weddings and we think of ourselves as maybe mortal too. I mostly go for funerals now. Word comes by Facebook or furtive text or a call from the neighbors who look after my interests there—the house, the donkeys, the ones who come and go.
When I got word in June that the poet Macdara Woods had died, I knew I’d have to make another trip. He was, along with Leland Bardwell, Pearce Hutchinson and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, a founding editor of the Dublin literary journal Cyphers. Whereas my poetry had been pretty much ignored in my own country, publication in a Dublin literary journal made me suddenly, internationally unknown. The tiny society of poets who write in the English language would not overfill a minor-league sports stadium. More people get chemotherapy every day than read or write poetry. So, with some few exceptions, we matter almost entirely to ourselves.
Some years ago, on New Year’s Eve, I walked with Seamus Heaney behind the hearse and cortege that took the body of Ireland’s most bookish man, the poet, critic and biographer Dennis O’Driscoll, from the church in Naas to St. Corban Cemetery where he was buried. Nine months later it was Heaney in the hearse and me riding shotgun from Donnybrook in Dublin to Bellaghy in Derry, three hours journey into the north to bring the body of the dead poet home, helpless as the few hundred who gathered around the grave, having gone that distance with the great voice of our time because it was all we could do, to be with him who could no longer be among us.
Last October it was a neighbor woman’s death by cancer, in June my friend Macdara Woods by Parkinson’s, then early in August I boarded the plane again in Detroit, making my way to JFK to connect to the late flight to Shannon and thence to Cork City because the poet Matthew Sweeney died of motor neuron disease. This year the catalog of losses seems inexhaustible and I’m thinking it must be the advancing years that put me in the red zone of mortality. In February it was the poet Philip Casey, who died in Dublin of a cruel cancer; in April my dog, Bill W., long past the eight-year life expectancy of his furry mammoth breed; he was the only mammal over 100 pounds who could bide with me. He was going on thirteen when his hips and shoulders all gave out. I’d had his grave open for two years plus, fearful of getting caught with a dead dog in the deepening frost of a Michigan winter.
And there’s truth in the bromide that by going the distance with our dead, the principal labor of grief gets done, in the deeply human labor of laving the body and laying it out, lifting and lowering, watching and witnessing, having our says and silences. Which is why I’m flying tonight a day late, alas, but nonetheless, to get my friend’s body where it needs to go, from Cork City in Munster to Ballyliffin in Ulster, six hours north, where I once caddied for him. I have a hat I bought in the pro shop on the day. I keep it in the clothes press in Moveen and I’ll wear it to his obsequies on Wednesday. I’ve read with Matthew in England and Scotland, Dublin, Galway, Cork and Clare, Adelaide, and Melbourne and Wellington, Australia, New Zealand; we tutored together several Arvon Courses, at Lumb Bank and elsewhere and in Michigan. He’s been on trains and boats and planes with me and to each of my principal residences in southeast and northern Michigan and my ancestral stones in County Clare. My heart is fairly desolate these days, with a long-estranged daughter, a long-distant marriage, the low-grade ever-present sense of what Michael Hartnett called the great subtraction. I’ve been badly subtracted from these last few years. Only for the fact that I banked such friendships against the howling winter of age, that I did not miss the best years of their being and their beloveds’ beings and the times of our lives that we caused on purpose to frequently intersect. Two Octobers ago, he made me lamb chops in my own kitchen on the south shore of Mullett Lake where he sat up nights making poems that became the last ones in the last books he published this year. He called it “The Bone Rosary,” which was the name I gave to the rope of old soup bones I’d had the butcher cut from the femurs of cows and given to my dog, Bill W., to chew the ma
rrow out of. I thought they would make a suitable memorial. The poem ties the dead dog and the dead poet together in my imagination.
THE BONE ROSARY
The big dog’s grave is already dug, a few
yards from the lake, and all the bones he’s
sucked the marrow from are strung on a rope
draped over the porch railing, a bone rosary,
waiting to be hooked to a rusty chain hung
from a metal post stuck in the ground, poking
out over the water. I can already imagine
the reactions of people in boats who’ll pass,
what they’ll think of the resident of the house.
there might be more to tickle their fancy—
I have a BB gun and ball bearings in a cupboard
that would kill as many black squirrels as I
wanted. And I might just commission a black
totem pole. And although there are no records
of anyone walking on the waters of Mullett Lake
I think I may visit a hypnotist in Harbor Springs
to see if she can facilitate this. I’d love to run out
into the middle of the lake, carrying the Stars
and Stripes and make all the folk in boats
I meet faint and fall into the water, maybe to
drown there, and befriend the big dog’s ghost.
After his burial I came to West Clare where the summer is winding to a close for another year, the last of the holiday makers are walking the strand line in Kilkee, whale watchers peer through their telescopes at Loop Head, the dolphin boat and charter fishing boat take the last of their passengers out the estuary in Carrigaholt, the pubs are frantic with late-season revelries. The pope is coming to a nation that has changed religiously in forty years since the last papal visit. There are worries, after the hot, dry June and July, that there won’t be enough fodder for the coming winter. Round bales of hay and black-wrapped silage and heaps of fodder are filling the barnyards, hopes for another cutting abound. Limerick wins the All Ireland Hurling Match, a man in the townland succumbs to his cancer; we’re passing through life is what is said. We’re passing through.
In many places they’ve lost the knowledge of the done thing and try to reinvent the ritual wheel every time a death occurs. Dead bodies are dispatched by hired hands, gotten to their oblivions without witness or rubric while the living gather at their convenience for bodiless obsequies where they “celebrate the life,” as if the good cry and the good laugh, so common at funerals, had gone out of fashion or lost its meaning. But the formula for dealing with death hasn’t changed. It is still essential to deal with our dead, to reconfigure but reaffirm the ties that bind us—the living and dead. It was the Irish connection that convinced me of that.
The reading of poems and sharing remembrances over Matthew’s dead body in its box in Cork were good to be a part of, likewise to beckon the mourners to their last look at him, close the coffin lid at the wake the following morning in Ballyliffen at the other end of the island nation, which was his home place of the many places he’d called home. He was shouldered from the house and up into the town by family and friends taking their turns at sharing the burden of his remains. Large muscle work prepares the ground of precious memories. It is not the other way around.
I rode in the hearse with Matthew Sweeney’s corpse out of town to the grave in Clonmany New Cemetery between showers and the tributes of the couple hundred fellow humans who stood out in the rain to see the poet’s body lowered into the ground. It is the done thing here, the only thing that we can do in the maw of rude mortality, the shoulder and shovel work, the words work, waling, waking, walking and witnessing, the vigil and chitchat, the hold and beholding these sad duties occasion, the stories we remember before we forget. These ties that truly bind, these sad done things uphold by focusing our diverted intentions on the job at hand, to wit, to get the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Jill Bialosky and the team at W. W. Norton for bringing three collections of essays, two collections of poetry, and a book of short fictions into being, and to Richard McDonough, agent extraordinaire, who found good digs for these projects. Robin Robertson, likewise, through his offices at Jonathan Cape in London, has been essential to these efforts. David Dobson at Westminster John Knox Press brought The Good Funeral, coauthored with Thomas G. Long, and, most recently, Whence & Whither into being. Gordon Lish published my first poems at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and commissioned my first essay for The Quarterly more than thirty years ago. For their scrutiny and attention to this work in words, the author is permanently grateful.
Thanks too to the editors of journals and periodicals, radio producers, academics, journalists, seminary presidents, and conference programmers for their interest in my reviews, commentaries, and opinions, where some of these essays first appeared, in broadcast or print or spoken word venues, in various incarnations of the texts found in this volume, among them:
The Candler School of Theology at Emory University
The Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Notre Dame University
The Wellcome Collection, London, UK
Commonweal magazine
The Journal for Preachers
BBC Radio 4 and Cast Iron Radio and Kate Bland
RTE Radio Ireland
NPR USA
PBS Frontline
Southword Journal (Munster Literary Center) Cork, Ireland
For many years my work has been enriched by friends and close readers, sons and daughter, colleagues and artists, the reverend clergy and family members, without whose ongoing conversations these essays would not have taken shape, among them Michael Heffernan, Keith Taylor, Richard Tillinghast, George Martin, Julie Young, Mary Tata, Colonel Dan Lynch, Patrick Lynch, Corrine D’Agostino, Emily Meier, Carolyn Belknap, Thomas Long, Doug McMunn, Eric Lorentzen and anonymous others—all fellow pilgrims in love’s bewilderments and life’s sustaining grace and mercies. No amount of thanks is sufficient to their generosities, nor catalog of gratitude complete without their names.
Permissions Credits
“How We Come to Be the Ones We Are” and “The Theory and Practice of Cremation”: Excerpted from The Good Funeral: Death, Grief, and the Community of Care. © 2013 Thomas G. Long and Thomas Lynch. Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press. All rights reserved.
“Bone Rosary” by Matthew Sweeney. From My Life as a Painter (Bloodaxe Books, 2018). Reproduced with permission of Bloodaxe Books. www.bloodaxebooks.com.
“Miracle” from Human Chain by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2010 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Excerpt from “Voices” from The Complete Poems of Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven. English translation copyright © 1961, and renewed 1989 by Rae Dalven. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from “Under Ben Bulben” from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems, Revised by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
“In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” copyright 1940 and © renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
“Audenesque” from Electric Light by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 2001 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Excerpt from “Tract” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions.
ALSO BY THOMAS LYNCH
Pr
ose
Apparition & Late Fictions
The Good Funeral
Booking Passage
Bodies in Motion and at Rest
The Undertaking
Poetry
The Sin-Eater
Walking Papers
Still Life in Milford
Grimalkin & Other Poems
Skating with Heather Grace
This Book Is For Gordon Lish
Copyright © 2020, 2019, 2005, 2000, 1997 by Thomas Lynch
Copyright © 2013 by Thomas G. Long and Thomas Lynch
Foreword copyright © 2020 by Alan Ball
All rights reserved
First Edition
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Jacket design by: Simon Wilkinson Creative
Jacket artwork: The paralytic is lowered through the roof of
a crowded house (engraving) by J. Newton, 1795, after C.R. Ryley / Wellcome Collection
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Production manager: Lauren Abbate
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Lynch, Thomas, 1948– author. | Ball, Alan, 1957– writer of foreword.