An undertaker's perspective on death

Summarised from a series of articles by Thomas Lynch, entitled 'The Right Hand of the Father', 'The Undertaking', and 'Embalming Father', in the London Review of Books (Jan 4th '96, Dec 22nd '94, and Jan 20th '95). Thomas Lynch's book The Undertaking, based on this series of articles, was published by Cape (1996, £9.99).

Thomas Lynch, who uniquely combines the professions of poet and undertaker, has gained a considerable reputation for his prose writings about his family profession. The perspective he takes on death is, interestingly, consistently contrary.

Over-familiarity with death leading to over-cautiousness

The Natural Death Centre, with its Day of the Dead, has always been concerned to promote awareness of our own mortality. In the following extract, Lynch points out the pitfalls of over-familiarity with death:

I had an uneventful childhood. Added to my mothers' conviction that her children were precious was my father's terrible wariness. He saw peril in everything, disaster was ever at hand. Some mayhem with our name on it lurked around the edges of our neighbourhood waiting for a lapse of parental oversight to spirit us away. In the most innocent of enterprises, he saw a danger. In every football game he saw the ruptured spleen, the death by drowning in every backyard pool, leukaemia in every bruise, broken necks on trampolines, the deadly pox or fever in every rash or bug bite.

It was, of course, the undertaking.

As a funeral director, he was accustomed to random and unreasonable damage. He had learned to fear.

My mother left big things to God. Of her nine children, she was fond of informing us, she had only 'planned' one. The rest of us, though not entirely a surprise - she knew what caused it - were gifts from God to be treated accordingly. Likewise, she figured on God's protection, and, I firmly believe, believed in the assignment of guardian angels whose job it was to keep us all out of harm's way.

But my father had seen, in the dead bodies of infants and children and young men and women, evidence that God lived by the Laws of Nature, and obeyed its statutes, however brutal. Kids died of gravity and physics and biology and natural selection. Car wrecks and measles and knives stuck in toasters, household poisons, guns left loaded, kidnappers, serial killers, burst appendices, bee stings, hard candy chokings, croups untreated - he'd seen too many instances of God's unwillingness to overrule the natural order which included, along with hurricanes and meteorites and other Acts of God, the aberrant disasters of childhood.

'Whenever I would ask to do this or that my father's first response was almost always No! He had just buried someone doing the very same thing'

So whenever I or one of my siblings would ask to go here or there or do this or that my father's first response was almost always No! He had just buried someone doing the very same thing.

Why wait to start the simple life until you're dead?

Lynch takes a similarly contentious line over simple funerals. For Lynch, a simple funeral which follows an extravagant life is almost hypocritical.

In the same way, the priest that married me - a man who loved the golf and gold ciboria and vestments made of Irish linen; a man who drove a great black sedan with a wine-red interior and who always had his eye on the cardinal's job - this same fellow, leaving the cemetery one day, felt called upon to instruct me thus: "No bronze coffin for me. No sir! No orchids or roses or limousines. The plain pine box is the one I want, a quiet Low Mass, and the pauper's grave. No pomp and circumstance."

'I would gladly distribute his CDs and credit cards among the needy of the parish'

He wanted, he explained, to be an example of simplicity, of prudence, of piety and austerity - all priestly and, apparently, Christian virtues. When I told him he needn't wait, that he could begin his ministry of good example even today, that he could quit the country club and do his hacking at the public links and trade his brougham for a Chevrolette; that free of his Florsheims and cashmeres and prime ribs, free of his bingo nights and building funds, he could become, for Christ's sake, the very incarnation of Francis himself, or Anthony of Padua; when I said, in fact, that I would be willing to assist him in this, that I would gladly distribute his CDs and credit cards among the needy of the parish, and that I would, when the sad duty called, bury him for nothing in the manner he would by then have become accustomed to; when I told the priest who had married me these things, he said nothing at all, but turned his wild eye on me in the way the cleric must have looked on Sweeney years ago, before he cursed him, irreversibly, into a bird.

Honouring the newly dead

Lynch is no fan, either, of burials which treat the corpse without due ceremony:

The bodies of the newly dead are not debris or remnant, nor are they entirely iron or essence.

'The bodies of the newly dead are not debris or remnant, they are hatchlings of a new reality'

They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honour.

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