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The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
PDF Ebook The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
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"...I had come to know that the undertaking that my father did had less to do with what was done to the dead and more to do with what the living did about the fact of life that people died," Thomas Lynch muses in his preface to The Undertaking. The same could be said for Lynch's book: ostensibly about death and its attendant rituals, The Undertaking is in the end about life. In each case, he writes, it is the one that gives meaning to the other. A funeral director in Milford, Michigan, Lynch is that strangest of hyphenates, a poet-undertaker, but according to Lynch, all poets share his occupation, "looking for meaning and voices in life and love and death." Looking for meaning takes him to all sorts of unexpected places, both real and imagined. He embalms the body of his own father, celebrates the rebuilt bridge to his town's old cemetery, takes issue with the Jessica Mitfords of this world, and envisages a "golfatorium," a combination golf course and cemetery that could restore joy to the last rites. In "Crapper," Lynch even contemplates the subtleties of the modern flush toilet and its relationship to the messy business of dying: "Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out." Death and fatherhood, death and friendship, death and faith and love and poetry--these are the concerns that power Lynch's undertaking. Throughout, Lynch pleads the case for our dead--who are, after all, still living through us--with an eloquence marked by equal parts whimsy, wit, and compassion. In the last essay, "Tract," he envisions almost wistfully the funeral he'd choose for himself, and then relinquishes that, too. Funerals, after all, are for the living. The dead, he reminds us, don't care.
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Audible Audiobook
Listening Length: 6 hours and 52 minutes
Program Type: Audiobook
Version: Unabridged
Publisher: Audible Studios
Audible.com Release Date: June 25, 2013
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Language: English, English
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A Poet’s Take on Life, Death, And Everything in BetweenThe Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch. W.W. Norton & Company 1997 $13.95.“This is none of my businessâ€, Thomas Lynch proclaims about his funeral, and yet, it is his: funeral director, mortician, undertaker, poet. Mr. Lynch is an Irish poet who here presents a dozen essays about his stock in trade, deftly weaving together anecdotes of the dead with funeral conventions and all manner of his profession.These essays are more lyric than memoir, and Mr. Lynch’s background in poetry shines through in all of them. In one, the reader is reminded, or perhaps the author is reminding himself, that “the dead don’t care†whether their bodies are cremated, buried, scattered, or left to science. Another essay targets the author’s upbringing with an overprotective, mortician father who sees death lingering around every corner. It is only when the author becomes both a father and funeral director himself that he sees the wisdom of his late father’s intense scrutiny.If there is any fault in these reflections, it is that the author tends to go on at length, over the course of several essays, about re-connecting with his Irish roots. Visiting family overseas turns him to introspection about both the country of Ireland and his Catholic rearing. Lynch draws interesting parallels between the plumbing and funeral business and man’s return to the natural world. In so doing, he also relates a succinct history of the death industry, but still manages to wax nostalgic and poetic for the way things were.No aspect of life, or death, is left unmentioned in this tome. The book starts off endearingly with the author’s own immature views of undertaking as a child: “And I wondered why it wasn’t underputter—you know, for the one who puts them underground.†Lynch meanders through the embalming process, obsesses about the positioning of a body, discusses Dr. Kevorkian’s method of self-euthanasia, love, sex, grief, and divorce. In one amusing essay Lynch ponders the possibilities of a combination golf course and cemetery, and the semantics of such a scheme. Another essay finds the author wandering the streets of his small town in Michigan, musing on local celebrities and their influence in getting a new town bridge built. Uncle Eddie is the star of yet another essay wherein he starts a crime scene clean-up business while Lynch relates his own experiences in the matter.Some essay topics may be too delicate a subject for certain readers, such as when Lynch examines the issue of children’s funerals and purchases of child-sized coffins of pink or blue. About dispensing advice for consumers, or even his own final preparations, the author appeals to the average person’s emotions: “Whatever’s there to feel, feel it—the riddance, the relief, the fright, and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality…you’ll know what to do. Go now, I think you are ready.â€
I enjoyed every moment of this book of essays by Thomas Lynch, who is not only a small-town undertaker but a published poet. Some of the essays concern practical issues related to the tending of the dead and their families, and some are lyrical and ruminative about our existence and the extinguishing of it. But all are well worth reading and pondering. There is discussion of the preparation of the body for the funeral home 'visitation,' caskets, cremation, expenses - as well as the grief suffered by family and friends, assisted suicide, societal norms for dealing with death. And in the midst of all this seriousness, there is irony and humor. We should all have a Thomas Lynch in our lives when the time comes that his services are needed.
A poet and and undertaker ... yeah. If you ever wanted to know what an undertaker things about absolutely everything, this is the book for you. He's a little cynical, even for me. He and I have very different opinions of Jack Kevorkian. (And we're both positive we're right.) Otherwise, an interesting read. He's based in Michigan and spends time in Ireland.
The Undertaking is a series of essays by Thomas Lynch, a man whose twin trades, unusual enough in themselves, and more so in combination, make him particularly suited to write on the themes of the book: he is both a poet and an undertaker. In the book Lynch writes about his day job--not the gory bits of the business, but about what it's like to care for the dead in the small town of Milford, Michigan, where very often he's burying someone with whom he's had a history in life:"After my housekeeper was installed, I went to thank Milo and pay the bill. The invoices detailed the number of loads, the washers and the dryers, detergent, bleaches, fabric softeners. I think the total came to sixty dollars. When I asked Milo what the charges were for pick-up and delivery, for stacking and folding and sorting by size, for saving my life and the lives of my children, for keeping us in clean clothes and towels and bed linen, 'Never mind that' is what Milo said. 'One hand washes the other.'"I place Milo's right hand over his left hand, then try the other way. Then back again. Then I decide that it doesn't matter. One hand washes the other either way."Lynch's specific recollections--about suicides he's known and cleaned up after, about embalming his own father--serve as entree to larger discussions--the function of funerals, the problem of assisted suicide, or, in a heart-breaking chapter, how we grow into the fear of parenting. The dark possibilities that haunt the rest of us are more real for an undertaker:"And as my children grew, so too the bodies of dead boys and girls I was called upon to bury--infants becoming toddlers, toddlers becoming school children, children becoming adolescents, then teens, then young adults, whose parents I would know from the Little League or Brownies or PTA or Rotary or Chamber of Commerce. Because I would not keep in stock an inventory of children's caskets, I'd order them, as the need arose, in sizes and half sizes from two foot to five foot six, often estimating the size of a dead child, not yet released from the county morgue, by the sizes of my own children, safe and thriving and alive. And the caskets I ordered were invariably 'purity and gold' with angels on the corners and shirred crepe interiors or powdery pink or baby blue. And I would never charge more than the wholesale cost of the casket and throw in our services free of charge with the hope in my heart that God would, in turn, spare me the hollowing grief of these parents."The book is beautifully written throughout, and thoughtful, and despite all that I've said above the author comes across as a man fully alive, who appreciates life but understands death, as a man worth knowing. At any rate, his book is very much worth reading.-- Debra Hamel
With 128 reviews already I don't suppose we need another one. But the subject is of interest to me, & so I gave it a 3 for that reason. But like other reviewers, I find it full of unnecessary philosophizing, mental meanderings, and off topic musings. This, because the author is a poet. And, I have found that people in this profession who have written about it seem a little cynical about their work, which I suppose is to be expected because it is the dismal trade.
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