A very grave man

"Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man."

Nice one, Mercutio: brave enough to make a joke while dying in the aftermath of a brawl in R&J. I finally got The Undertaking : life studies from the dismal trade (1997) by Thomas Lynch out of the library. It's been on the edge of my awareness for so many years that I was almost convinced that I have already read it. But every book is new when you get as old and vague as me. Lynch is a) a funeral director / mortician in Smallsville, Michigan b) a Bloodaxe poet c) an essayist in the same bin as Lewis "Lives of the Cell" Thomas [bloboprev]. Lewis Thomas, as a physician, ruminated on matters of interest to doctors in a regular column for the NEJM. Thomas Lynch deals rather with doctor's errors, as some playfully call the dead. It's important to note that undertakers are not defined by their profession anymore than The Blob is defined by "Science Matters" it's official title. Lynch's essays go some way beyond a discussion of embalming fluid and satin coffin linings; but the subtitle sets limits to his rambles. He's been to Kennys for a reading. One of the threads that stitched Lynch's life together is his relationship with his Lynch rellies back 'home' in Co. Clare: in particular his aunt Nora of Moveen Co Clare.

On his first ever trip to Clare, Nora obliged him to attend the wake of a neighbour. It was before embalming had reached Clare and ". . . there was a terrible odor of gastro-intestinal distress. Beneath the fine linens, Mrs Regan's belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Between decades of the rosary, neighbor women shot anxious glaces among one another. Later I heard, in the hushed din of gossip, that Mrs Regan, a light-hearted woman unopposed to parties, had made her dinner the day before on boiled cabbage and onions and ham and later followed with several half-pints of lager at Hickie's in Kilkee. And these forgivable excesses, while they may not have caused her death, were directly responsible for the heavy air inside the room she was waked in . . ." 

You may be sure that Tom Lynch looks and acts the part when he's hand-holding the bereft through the logistics of death. But Tom Lynch the poet is sensitive to irony and incongruity in life and it's impossible for him not to find the funny [both funny-hilarious and funny-peculiar] side: as in the excerpt above. Sometimes, for me, a funny off-hand phrase will jar -  YMMV. He's not immune to Nobelitis when he has a chapter conflating the ethics and practicality of abortion and assisted suicide. The penultimate chapter riffs on the fact that, through the 1990s Jack Kevorkian was operating his Thanatron to off ~130 folks for a fee in Pontiac, MI just 35km NE of Lynch & Sons Funeral Homes. While Undertakers are in the death trade, it doesn't give them any, let alone any particular, expertise in the termination trade. That whole chapter could really do with a copy editor to marshal Lynch's messy but strongly held ideas on a difficult topic.

The last chapter (there's an Epilogue also) he returns to useful avuncular advice from a life-time's experience in end of life issues. He cautions against pre-arranging your own funeral for example; arguing " . . . why should an arthritic septuagenarian with blurred vision and some hearing loss be sent to do battle with the undertaker instead of the forty-something heirs apparent with their power suits and web browsers and cellular phones?". And if you negotiate your funeral when you are still that forty-something, what's to guarantee that the bargain struck will still be valid 20 30 40 years later as local undertakers get merged and gobbled by Megacasket Inc.? He notes that heirs have skin in the game w.r.t. the spending of their inheritance.

The present moment opens like a gift:
The balding month, the grey week, the blue morning,
The hour's routine, the minute's passing glance—
All seem like godsends now.  And what to make of this?
At the end the word that comes to him is Thanks.

Thomas Lynch. Refusing at Fifty-Two to Write Sonnets