Thomas Lynch

“I’ve always thought that funerals were useful,” Thomas Lynch states while reading from an essay about his own future funeral entitled “Tract.”  Who could expect anything less of a man who grew up in the funeral business and who has owned and operated one of the six family funeral homes in Milford, Michigan for the last 35 years?  His experiences generally take the form of essays as in “The Undertaking” and “Bodies in Motion and at Rest.”  A collection of stories in “Apparition and Late Fictions,” shows Lynch’s precision even with fiction.  The author is more talented still.  A new book of poetry, “Walking Papers,” will be published later in 2010.

But there is a deeper purpose to Lynch’s writings.  The funeral director sees many issues with the greater American population.  In most other cultures around the world, the dead are celebrated, viewed, cherished.  There are many traditions involved.  Americans seem to believe we need a continued disconnection with the dead.  The Lynchs’ disagree.

“I view the viewing of the dead as one of the most fundamental aspects of dealing with grief.  Reality can no longer be denied.  Death is literally staring you in the face…we can imagine it, but actually seeing it is something totally different,” says Patrick Lynch, Thomas’ brother. 
            Up until just a few decades ago, the actual body of the deceased would remain in the home for visitations, luncheons, and memorial services.  This is a very rare occurrence now.  In fact, Lynch claims, “The presence of the dead at their own funerals has become optional.”  This is something he most certainly takes issue with.

“Where death means nothing, life is meaningless.  Funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters.  It’s how we assign meaning to our remarkable histories and the rituals we devise to conduct the living, beloved and dead have less to do with performance than with meaning,” Lynch comments.

Cremation is on the rise, standing at about 38 percent.  Lynch states that he encourages family and friends to go watch the fire, if for nothing else to see that the body is properly taken care of.  Many refuse.  Lynch sees a problem with this too.  In the past, “…we dealt with death by dealing with the dead.  Now we don’t.”

Lynch believes that dealing with death, dying, bereavement are ways to connect with other humans.  “There’s a giving up of your humanity when you console them,” he claims.  Lynch, originally a published poet, began writing books about the art of “undertaking” after an unofficial promise was made to his father.  He learned the idea that taking care of the dead was something necessary to take care of the living from his parents.  It seemed like a perfect concept to explore in “The Undertaking,” one of his first books of essays.

“To undertake is to bind oneself to the performance of a task, to pledge or promise to get it done.”  Though this wasn’t the first impression Lynch got as a child.  When trying to explain his father’s profession to fellow classmates, he said, “He takes them under.  Like underground!”  He was still too young to grasp the full meaning of his father’s work at that time, but grew to understand as the years went on.
            There is a reason for Lynch’s memoir-esque books of essays and poems (now fiction too).  “What I’ve written is, while the dead don’t care, the dead matter.  The dead matter to the living.  In accompanying the dead to where they need to go, we get where we need to be…with the certain knowledge that life has changed.”  I believe that’s the main message we can take away from this gifted writer.