Grave humour

The celebrated poet Thomas Lynch is also an undertaker. Death, he says, is not the worst thing that can happen

OF all the hyphenated job descriptions that exist in this age of multi-tasking, there can hardly be a combination more intriguing than undertaker-poet. It surely outdoes beat-poet or nature-poet or performance-poet, and it has worked wonders for Thomas Lynch. Two healthily selling volumes of his poetry are still in print: Grimalkin (named after a cat he hates with obscure passion), and Still Life In Milford (after the Michigan town where he buries a couple of hundred of his fellow citizens each year). You can hear him tell all about it on Sunday evenings, where Radio 4 is currently serialising his new essay collection, Bodies in Motion and At Rest (Cape, #10). The essays sound like Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days rewritten by a blarney Catholic with a back history of divorce and drink. Who also owns a funeral home.

We meet in Moveen in westernmost Ireland, where he is lodging in a whitewash cottage that belonged to his great-great-grandparents. On this fine morning the village is burying Mrs O'Dwyer, dead at 105. "I'm sure there were reasons for her being 105," Lynch says, recalling his parents' deaths in their mid-60s. "If heaven means getting to ask your dozen questions then I'd like to ask: 'What did You have in mind?' Or perhaps heaven is where you run out of questions. Maybe that's it."

As with Garrison Keillor, there is an improvisational quality to Lynch's homilies. He does not, it must be said, match one's idea of a funeral director, being neither gaunt nor sepulchral. He is 52, thin on top and thick round the middle. A close-mown ginger beard follows a frog's throat double chin. Tiny blue eyes blink expectantly from behind spectacles, waiting for you to finish your thoughts. He takes the gum from his mouth, pokes at the peat fire, aglow despite the morning's warmth, makes the tea and talks.

After studying English - "but mostly gin rummy" - at university, he went to mortuary school, having decided, like three of his siblings, to join his father's business. "I think it was to do with the example that my father set. He was a great funeral director and he took the service to the families who called us very seriously. I was always amazed to see the impact that he had on people's lives. They not only gave him a considerable amount of money but they felt duty bound to thank him. I've never once written out a cheque for $5,000 and also felt I had to write a thank-you note."

To this day, if you ring Lynch and Sons you will be answered by a voice not a machine. At 2am, Lynch, or a Lynch brother, will answer from a bedside phone. In The Undertaking, Lynch's first volume of prose, he expended much ink on Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death.

"The worst thing that can happen is not that people die," he says. "They have been doing that with stunning regularity for most of history. The worst thing that can happen is that people can become distant and still be breathing."

But can any undertaker make good that distance after a death? "I think what a funeral director can do is put at the disposal of a particular family rubrics and rituals and ceremonies, liturgies and languages that they may draw on if they're orthodox in religious terms or the roll-your-own metaphors if they are not. Most times, people are stuck between wanting to do everything they can and doing nothing at all. You can move them to some manageable ground in the middle."

But what if the deceased wants nothing? My father, 84 next month, says he wants no service at all. "This is the odd turn that has happened in the last couple of generations. The funeral used to be an inter-generational transaction given by the living to the dead. The living saw it as a tribute and a gift, but because of marketing and advertising and a lot of changes in the culture now it's an entirely narcissistic event where the one who's dead gets to say what they want done. And the emphasis is on minimisation because the gift you give to your survivors is 'no expenses'. In a sense, that's a transgression of a contract based on the notion that any death is a sadness and the living get to work that sadness out at a funeral."

So a funeral is not for the dead? "Hell no. The dead guy does not care. If I were you, I'd tell your father: 'When you're dead I'll do what suits me because it will be my money.' One of the first things you learn about dead people is that they don't have good credit."

BY the time he had pledged himself to the family business in the early 1970s, Lynch had discovered Ireland. Throughout his childhood, his father had told the family to remember in their prayers their cousins, "Tommy and Nora on the banks of the Shannon". Relieved to miss the Vietnam call-up in 1970, Thomas made the pilgrimage to the land of Yeats and Joyce and looked them up, falling wildly in love with Ireland. Tommy, whose flat-capped portrait hangs on a wall, died the next year but Nora, his spinster sister, lived until 1992, by which time he had installed for her the village's first phone, its first television and its first plumbing. In "Oprah terms", he says, what he found in Ireland was not literature but the Lynch "family pathologies".

In 1972, back in Michigan, he married and by the decade's end had had four children. In the early 1980s, however, his wife Yvonne told him she had fallen in love with a man from her video production class at the local community college. "The only way we could have peaceably lived together would have been for me to pretend this wasn't happening. As they say, denial ain't just a river in Egypt. I'd have to act as if I hadn't noticed. I was prepared to play the cuckold. I wasn't prepared to play the fool."

Although he says their parting in 1984 turned out to be a "divorce made in heaven", and although he was awarded custody of the children, these were tough times. I ask if it was the struggle of single parenthood that led him to drink too much. He says he drank too much because he's an alcoholic.

"I drank from when I was 16 but I don't think my drinking really turned on me - it may have turned on others, truth told - until several years after the divorce. I didn't come home drunk. I was an upright citizen. I went to work, went to Rotary, changed the diapers, did the laundry."

One morning sore-headed from a Sunday drinking session, he was making up the children's packed lunches and saw pure fear in the eyes of his nine-year-old son. For six months after that, he remained a "dry-drunk" until he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and "got sobriety".

One of the paradoxes of Lynch's work is that while he is clear- headed about the dead - and the dead drunk - he can goo over the living. About his second wife, Mary Tata, he gushes over the "blindness of love" in her eyes, calls her an Italian artist with French sensibilities and compares her to Julia Ormond. (In fact, she ran the liquor store in Milford and is but a few years his junior.) Some of the new essays err towards sentimentality too. His tentative faith in God has become more flowery. His doubts about abortion have hardened. When he writes about the unhappy fate of liberated woman, you spy small-town Catholic conservatism poking its bony fingers through the sod. What redeems the weaker poetry and prose - and most of it is sharp, resilient, funny - is that it's not in the least pompous. "Forgive me, I go on a bit. Maybe it comes with age," he apologises in one long poem. In an essay on teaching a son to fish, he breaks off: "I know you're thinking that's cute enough to make you puke."

And the "damn cat" is spared all pathos. The big news for admirers of his poem Grimalkin is that the feline with "whorish treacheries and crimes against upholsteries" died last year. Lynch, who had over- prepared for this event by having a funeral stone cut with the dates 1978-1999, is delighted. Would he have re-engraved the stone? "No, I'd have killed it. The idea that Martin Luther King would live in one millennium and this cat would live in two " For the benefit of the photographer, we visit spectacular cliffs where three mackerel- fishing Lynch ancestors were once washed to their deaths, and then head to vast Moyarta graveyard where Nora and Tommy lie in a tomb erected by "Thomas and Mary Lynch, Milford, Michigan, USA".

Ireland respects its dead in ways we have forgotten. The local radio announces the day's "removals", the reason, Lynch explains, being that you are expected to turn up. The town of Moveen certainly has for Mrs O'Dwyer, whose internment now busies the cemetery.

As we observe from a respectful distance, I ask Lynch if he fears death. Well, he says, he doesn't run blindly into traffic, if that is what I mean. He throws me the question back, making me think carefully. I fear losing people more, I decide. "And that's the same for most people."

Ireland also respects its poets. Would this one wish to be buried next to Tommy and Nora on the banks of the Shannon? "If I died here, that is what my children might decide," Lynch says, examining the stone- work of his possible resting place with professional dispassion. How could he object? The dead, as he is very fond of saying, don't care.

Mini Profile:

Name: Thomas Lynch Born: 1948, Detroit Educated by nuns and Christian Brothers, Lynch took a degree course at university and mortuary school, graduated in 1973 then took over the funeral home in Milford, Michigan. He visited Ireland for the first time in 1970 to retrace his roots. He now spends time there in a small cottage in West Clare which was once the home of his great grandfather.

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.