About 100,000 years ago the fossil record shows our very distant ancestors started tucking their dead under the topsoil. Over a somewhat shorter timescale, but long enough to identify the four horsemen as Stroke, Coronary Occlusion, Alzheimer’s and the Big C, Lynch & Sons have kept the tradition going, the American way. The Milford, Michigan end of things is handled by Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet (Grimalkin and Other Poems, 1995). He does the works—embalming, casketing, flower-arranging. If he hasn’t got the box your dear departed would have wanted, his brother Tim, working in the next town, can probably supply it. High-temperature exothermic redox combustion can be arranged too, for those few Americans who insist on the somewhat cheaper method of disposal preferred by more than seventy percent of the British population, though few apparently do. The American funeral industry seems to be quite happy to keep things the way they are, embalming and interment and grave maintenance being the last opportunity to fleece the consumer.
Lynch has strong views about why embalming is part of the American way of death, much as he has mordant and occasionally proprietorial views about why we shirk our own undertakings. Some people might find it quite piquant to have flayed cows’ heads in formalin looming over them—courtesy of Damien Hirst—while they eat in Soho restaurants, but it would be hard to deny that while death as a shared and communal event is pretty much the distracted reality of late-twentieth century consciousness it has never been more subjectively oppressive. Necro-kitsch is one name for what takes its place, and I dare say it won’t take very long to find its intellectual equivalent in academic social science curricula. Sure, we talk things to death, and just about every child, it seems, has witnessed thousands of formatted ‘TV deaths’, but there is no escaping the sense that the symbolic weight of this, after all, most dependable event, has been separated from common life and encysted in individual fears. Perhaps the late Dr Freud might have found it solid confirmation of his Eros and Thanatos equation, obscenity being a more literal-minded word that it used to be.
Indeed, if humankind can be roughly divided, as the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub has suggested, into those who go hunting and those who clear up the mess afterwards, then undertakers evidently don’t have much time to be Hemingways. Thomas Lynch writes about himself as one of the ‘dismal traders, funeral types [...] who dress in black, and work the weekends and the holidays, who line the cars and lay the bodies out, who rise and go out in the dark when someone dies and someone calls for help.’ Having cleared up a few messes and signed passports for the ultimate journey myself, I was curious to see how things looked from the other end of the table, though I should add that medical qualifications are no prerequisite for reading this book: Lynch has a few telling comments to make about that other Michigan resident, the man who was described in last year’s British Medical Journal as a ‘medical hero’. Dr Jack Kevorkian has now, at the latest body count, had a hand in twenty-eight ‘physician-assisted suicides’. Lynch bristles at the oxymoronic notion of anyone being assisted ‘in [their] one and only suicide’ and dubs Kevorkian’s idiosyncratic interpretations of a pathologist’s duties ‘kevorking’. Here he touches on an important argument about a physician’s duties to a suffering patient, and asks the perfectly legitimate question: ‘Is it possible to assist the ones we love with their dying instead of assisting with their killing?’ A retired pathologist on a mission with a self-styled ‘Thanatron’ in the boot of his car is somehow a very American response to the challenges of providing decent palliative care.
As such observations would suggest, Lynch is neither deaf to the zeitgeist nor a lugubrious croque-mort. He comes across as a man of deep feeling and humanity with a keen sense of his Irish Catholic roots. And why shouldn’t he be guild-proud, a stickler for detail? Undertaking is a job which requires decorum and decency, a sound grasp of the difference between what happens and what matters, and hangs on a uncommon ability to give form to the messiness of emotions. For a poet, it is nearly native habitat. Lynch tells of an Episcopalian deacon deservedly receiving a verbal cuff from the mother of a newly deceased teenage girl he had been attempting to free from durance with the empty vessel of the professional grief-counsellor—‘“I’ll tell you when it’s ‘just a shell’”, the woman said, “for now and until I tell you otherwise, she’s my daughter.”’ On that scale of delicacy, good undertakers are probably as rare as good poets; Lynch actually steals a couple of recollections of poet-friends into his book, notably of the hypochondriac Matthew Sweeney, ‘whose headaches are all brain tumours, his fevers meningitis, his hangovers all peptic ulcers or diverticulitis’. Sweeney comes in for some companionable ribbing for having no sense of what might be beyond ‘reasonable doubt’: implied criticism, no doubt, but preferable to the ingratiating tone of the praise heaped elsewhere on Lynch’s editor Robin Robertson. That minor lapse occurs in an otherwise nicely judged essay called Words Made Flesh, which gives us a fairly close look at Lynch himself (hiding behind the name ‘Henry Nugent’), struggling through alcoholism, a marriage breakup and the attendant loneliness. Generally, Lynch is very astute at avoiding the confessional or even flaunting his expertise in what might be called the taxonomy of decay or the more bizarre paraphernalia of his trade.
If undertaking is a calling at 5 AM, it is also a business, and Lynch has a damper for the ‘News Hound’ at the local television station, whose ‘scoop’, defying any kind of business sense, is that Lynch & Sons have been selling their caskets for more than they paid for them: Lynch reckons his profit margin is about five percent, which doesn’t seem much in a job with such terrible hours. It therefore comes as no surprise that he should remain unperturbed by Jessica Mitford’s revelations in The American Way of Death or Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, and in what is at once the funniest and harshest essay in the book he sends up the ‘What Folks Want in a Casket’ approach with a whimsical vision of golf courses doubling as crematoria: ‘the combination of golf and good grieving seems a natural, each divisible by the requirement for large tracts of green grass, a concentration on holes, and the need for a someone to carry the bags—caddies or pallbearers’. The same piece contains a rawly moving account of a fellow undertaker working for eighteen hours at no extra pay to reconstruct the staved-in face and skull of a murder victim so that her mother can grieve over her daughter’s recognisable remains. ‘“Barbaric” is what Jessica Mitford called this “fussing over the dead body”. I say the monster with the baseball bat was barbaric.’ Lynch’s comeback seems misplaced; Mitford was targetting corporate takeovers of independent firms like Lynch & Sons, companies such as Service Corporation International with their shareholders and annual report: ‘S.C.I. experienced the most dynamic year in its history in 1994, reaching new milestones in revenues and net incomes while establishing a solid presence in the European funeral industry.’ (I quote from a March 1997 edition of Vanity Fair kindly left by an American patient in my waiting room.)
Recognising ourselves among small acts of kindness, and recognising what is beyond any kindness, might be what this book is urging us towards. Thomas Lynch recognises himself in ‘the cardiac blue’ of his father—the undertaker overtaken—who had arranged with his sons that they would embalm him when he died, the fearful man whose characteristic first thought in younger life had been to ban his kids from doing the usual things children do because he ‘had just buried someone doing the very thing’. Lynch recognises his fellow townspeople by telling them back their own life stories as he prepares them for burial, remembering convivial occasions disrupted by the mixture of fright and curiosity that the profession of making a living from the dead provokes. Vindicating Gladstone’s adage, he writes, ‘the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love you grieve and there are no exceptions—only those who do it well and those who don’t. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we wreak a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment: McFunerals, McFamilies, McMarriage, McValues.’
‘One so seldom learns the end of things in life’, wrote Henry Green in one of the sad little tales in his book of collected short writings, Surviving. Given that he has been privy, time and again, to the only end of things, Thomas Lynch’s book is almost a miracle of feeling, tact and good sense, a remarkable and unbookish study of all the implications of the word ‘undertaking’. Lynch has, in a sense, reclaimed the innocent belief he had of it when he was a child: that his father’s job literally involved taking the dead underground. His book is a small classic on the most universal subject, and why the care we give to those who are past caring ultimately reflects how we look to ourselves, alive and civilised. It is a long time indeed since anyone dared write an ars moriendi.