reading notes

by Thomas Lynch

ISBN: 140276238

Lynch is a poet, whose day job happens to be funeral director in a smallish town in Michigan. Pretty much his whole family is involved with “the dismal trade”: his Dad was a funeral director, too, and many of his siblings work for funeral homes.

His family is Irish and Catholic and broken in many of the usual ways families get broken. I’d say the brokenness of the living, more that the details of the dead, are what he is really writing about in this book.

Funerals are for the living, he reminds us. The rituals associated with death are all about the folks who are alive — the folks who are dead don’t care anymore. They are gone. This doesn’t make the rituals less important, but more so, argues Lynch. To ignore this fact, to give short shrift to the process, is something we do to our detriment. He doesn’t mean spend a lot on a fancy casket and flowers; he means acknowledging that death and dying is a part of living is something we have to do, because not doing it means we lose something else entirely.

He manages to be funny in this book: not with cheap shots, but with honesty. There are details about his job that I found interesting (the different between a casket and a coffin; he charges wholesale for child-sized) and some that were mostly missing (if you want technical information about embalming you won’t find it here, but he does talk about he and a brother embalming their father.) His tone is reflective without being morbid. Facts are facts, we are all going to die, and you don’t need to dwell on that as much as you’d think, even if you are a funeral director and a poet.

I suppose part of my interest in a book like this comes from my personal experience of grief. My mother died about a year and half ago, and before that happened, I didn’t know anything about grief and not nearly as much about loss as I thought I did. So reading these essays put grief in a context for me: the context of daily living, so I can see how other people do it (or don’t) and still live their lives. Grief is a universal human experience because loving is, because dying is. Lynch reminds reader of that in ways that are unusual (one essay is about how the actress who played one of the Baldwin sisters on The Waltons agitated to get a washed-out bridge to the old town cemetary restored) and thought-provoking (“Dr Jack” Kevorkian is a local nutter in the context of another essay.) Definitely recommended.