The way Americans make meaning of death has changed dramatically over the last several decades. Declining religious belief has led to a decline in our observance of the traditions of burial and mourning. When the body is no longer a sacred vessel, then its care after death may no longer seem to be of vital importance. It is easy enough to move the corpse offstage in the name of hygiene and decorum. And why gather in a church when you could go to the ballpark or the driving range or the bird sanctuary, places that may have meant more to the decedent in life anyway?
The way we observe a death is expressive of our sense of a life’s meaning, of its shape and the terms of its success or failure. The “last ride” for a biker; the gun salute for a soldier; the Jack Daniel’s poured over the grave of a drinking buddy: We may have to make do without religion, but we can’t do without our symbols. Even so, the way we do death in the United States now more and more expresses our lack of ontological confidence. We no longer seem certain that life means anything at all.
Thomas Lynch may be the only major poet-undertaker writing in English, which must count as a surprise. The two professions seem so perfectly aligned—or rather, so hopelessly entwined. Death poetry is almost its own genre in English, filling up the anthologies: Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death”; Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice”; and most famously, Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” Even as our poets ponder birth, beauty, and desire, we expect them to keep the end in view. A major poet who did not wrestle with death would be like a horse who only makes right turns.
As a poet, Lynch prefers the received forms, especially the sonnet. As an undertaker, he is working within received forms, too. In the 2007 PBS Frontline special, “The Undertaking,” set inside his family’s funeral home, he proceeds as judiciously as his late friend, Seamus Heaney, composing a villanelle. We observe Lynch’s meeting with a young couple whose toddler son is terminally ill. They can’t decide whether they want him buried or cremated. “You’ll want to look to your son to guide you,” Lynch tells them. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do. I promise you. You’ll know what to do.” Lynch seems to be a man to whom others instinctively turn in a crisis. There aren’t many better qualifications for an undertaker—or for that matter, a poet.
What started out for Lynch as a sinecure in a family business became a calling, something that he was born to do, in both senses. He has written in The Good Funeral (2013) that “[S]howing up, being there, helping in an otherwise helpless situation [is] made heroic by the same gravity I had sensed when I first stood in [an] embalming room as a boy—the presence of the dead made the presence of the living more meaningful somehow, as if it involved a basic and intuitively human duty to witness.” Again, we feel the consonance between Lynch’s two vocations—what is the business of the poet, if not to bear witness? Poetry, as we know, changes nothing.
Lynch’s sentiments are not those of a believing Christian but of one who dearly wishes he still lived in a world of faith. He was a cradle Catholic, an altar boy, then a choleric doubter. He finally settled into agnosticism, albeit one that tends to list toward belief, especially when things get tough. His position may soon be the dominant one in the West, if it is not already. In that sense, he is ideally placed to help us make sense of the collapsing edifice of ritual and symbol that we once leaned on when the end drew near.
In his essay collection, “The Depositions” (2019), Lynch tells the story of a fellow undertaker who spent eighteen hours preparing the body of a kidnapped and murdered girl so that she could be presented to her mother more or less intact.
She was dead, to be sure, and damaged; but her face was hers again, not the madman’s version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but he had retrieved her death from the one who had killed her.
A successful funeral service is a drama of overcoming. Fearsome emotions are confronted, their measure is taken, space is made for them, and the march of the living resumes, as Lynch has written, “with the certain knowledge that life will never be the same.” Lynch wants to return us to physical intimacy with our dead. Tolerating that intimacy and even finding comfort in it is part of the work we need to do, as Lynch says, “to get the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.”
Lynch’s reservations about our changing mores around burial and grief are part of his broader quarrel with modernity: with the cold comfort of rationalism as against the enchantments of his Catholic youth; with the creed of ultimate personal agency as against familial responsibility; above all, with our refusal of the past as a source of knowledge. Lynch is betting both on that past—his personal, familial, and communal past—and the future of the poems and essays he has left for posterity. His wager is that the eternal now needs less tending.
The funeral traditions of cultures not our own may seem bizarre and alien. They speak to lives lived on a fundamentally different basis. Even within our own culture, the differences may be striking. Black Americans often mourn their dead, for example, very differently from the way I learned to do it. The clothes are different, there is more carrying on, I might even be inclined to call the performances of the mourners undignified—precisely because, seen from the outside, they appear to me to be performances. Stepping back, though, I can see that in that wailing and prostration there is a kind of tribute, a sense of what is owed to the dead. “Before” and “after” must be marked off as different. Likewise, a funeral in Mexico or India may be almost incomprehensible to us, because it is embedded in a different symbolic network. Ideally, however, the work that is being done by the mourners is essentially unchanged. And we hope that someday others will do the same for us.
Lynch’s writing is inseparable from the town of Milford, Michigan, where Lynch & Sons “has a corner on the market.” Until his retirement, Lynch was known there as both a poet and a Chamber of Commerce stalwart, with the emphasis perhaps on the latter. Milford, a town of 15,000 residents located northwest of Detroit, must be different now from the prelapsarian community in which Lynch was raised, but it seems to have escaped the radical discontinuities that other Midwestern places have suffered. In Milford, the past still has a place, and the people mostly stay on. Most of us now die, though, far from the places that formed us, which makes commemoration trickier. Imagine throwing a funeral to which no one showed up. That must be a more and more common occurrence now, that only the clergyman and the sexton attend the grave. It is difficult to imagine a more desolate scene.
Jessica Mitford’s exposé of funeral industry practices, The American Way of Death (1966), argued that American salesmanship makes of death a business like any other. “The same familiar Madison Avenue language,” she complained, “with its peculiar adjectival range designed to anaesthetize resistance to all sorts of products, has seeped into the funeral industry[.]” Mitford’s book may be the one thing about which Lynch has no sense of humor; he refers to its author in bitter tones (“a ballroom communist…the type who tips well but likes to shoplift”), as someone who has given an honorable profession a bad name.
Lynch takes pains to depict the work of Lynch & Sons as a low-margin business. “The whole lash up,” he has written, “is mortgaged and remortgaged well into the next century…five percent of [our revenues] we hope to call profit.” To judge by several scenes in “The Undertaking,” the price of funeral home solvency is eternal vigilance. The phone must be answered at all hours, as human beings die around the clock and without an appointment. Such calls are met with courtesy, efficiency, and tact. It must take a toll.
Indeed, the problem with the American funeral business may not be that it is a business, but rather that its business has become not so much helping families through their grief as indulging our desire not to confront the facts as they are. This avoidance starts with euphemism—our tendency, for example, with all good intentions, to say that someone has “expired” or “passed” rather than “died.” (In his writing, Lynch sometimes refers to a funeral’s subject as “the dead guy,” though he probably wasn’t quite this blunt with families.) Having performed this linguistic sleight of hand, it becomes easier to move the body itself offstage by choosing cremation rather than burial and an anodyne “celebration of life” rather than a church service. For Lynch, this is a mistake.
The effort to minimize the hurt by minimizing the loss, pretending that a dead body has lost its meaning or identity, is another tune we whistle past the graveyard. The sad truths I’ve been taught by the families of the dead are these: seeing is believing; knowing is better than not knowing; to name the hurt returns a kind of comfort; the grief ignored will never go away.
With the old consolations gone, we are radically uncertain what to do about death. “See you on the other side,” we now whisper over the cremation urn, feigning indifference as to what, if anything, might await us there. Thomas Lynch has spent a career telling us that, in matters of the spirt, such empty bravado will not do.