CHAPTER 1
HOW WE COME TO BETHE ONES WE ARE
Thomas Lynch
In the summer of 2012, Gus Nichols, one of Dublin'sgreat undertakers and the President of FIAT-IFTA, the InternationalFederation of Thanatologists Associations, invited me toIreland to speak on a subject of my choosing. FIAT-IFTA is acongress of funeral directors from around the world and at this,their twelfth international convention, there would be representativesfrom thirty nations, two hundred and fifty registrantsin all, from places as far-flung as Malaysia and Sierra Leone,Argentina and Australia, Canada and China and Columbia.My brother Patrick was the immediate past president of ourNational Funeral Directors Association and traveled with meas a delegate from the United States to thank Gus, FinbarrO'Connor and, indeed, several members of the Irish Associationof Funeral Directors for having traveled to Chicago theyear before to participate in Pat's convention. There would be agala banquet and golf outing, tours of Glasnevin Cemetery andthe Titanic Exhibition in Belfast, and plenty of good shoppingin Grafton Street. The conference was held in Dublin Castle, ahuge, walled compound in the center of that ancient city, withturrets and towers, dungeons and courtyards, dating to early inthe thirteenth century—eight hundred years of history oozingfrom its stones. And I found myself constructing a line for theobituary I am always editing in my head that would someday inthe long-distant future read, "He had presented to funeral directorsfrom around the world." Travel and castles will do that toyou. I was grateful for the invitation.
I had been to the castle once before. Indeed, I'd been toIreland dozens of times in the forty-some years since my firstvisit there in the winter of 1970, in search of my roots and myfuture, as twentysomethings are wont to do. But my first visitto Dublin Castle was in the late 1980s, to the offices of PoetryIreland, which were housed there in Bermingham Tower, toarrange for a reading tour of the country after my first book ofpoems was published.
And now, twenty-five years and several books later, risingto speak about our common calling to a room full of mortuarysorts from Asia and Africa and the Americas, from Europe andthe Antipodes and just down the road, it seemed as if my life'sworks and preoccupations—poetry and funerals, the literary andthe mortuary arts—were finally melding into one. They were, inmany ways, the same but different: equal tributaries of the oneenterprise. So much so, in fact, that I had titled my presentationafter a poem I intended to read them called "Local Heroes."How many funeral directors from small-town, middle America,I asked myself, get to hold forth their ideas and recite their poemsto colleagues from around the world in Dublin Castle in the middleof June? It felt like a gift and I felt lucky and exceptionallyfortunate and it made me wonder, as Gus Nichols was givingme a generous introduction and I was gathering my papers andthoughts together and readying to rise to the august occasion,and praying, as we do, not to make the huge fool of myself that Ihave in me to do, I wondered what exactly am I doing here?
How do we come to be the ones we are?
I was raised by Irish Catholics. Even as I write that itsounds a little like "wolves" or some especially feral class ofcreature. Not in the apish, nativist sense of immigrant hordes,rather in the fierce faith and family loyalties, the pack dynamicsof their clannishness, their vigilance and pride. My parentswere grandchildren of immigrants who had mostly marriedwithin their tribe. They'd sailed from nineteenth-century povertyinto the prospects of North America, from West Clareand Tipperary, Sligo and Kilkenny, to Montreal and Ontario,upper and lower Michigan. Graces and O'Haras, Ryans andLynchs—they brought their version of the "one true faith,"druidic and priest-ridden, punctilious and full of superstitions,from the boggy parishes of their ancients to the fertile expanseof middle America. These were people who saw statues move,truths about the weather in the way a cat warmed to the fire,omens about coming contentions in a pair of shoes left up ona table, bad luck in some numbers, good fortune in others.Odd lights in the nightscape foreshadowed death; dogs' eyesattracted lightning; the curse of an old woman could lay onelow. The clergy were to be "given what's going to them," butotherwise, "not to be tampered with." Priests were feared andtheir favor curried—their curses and blessings opposing polesof the powerful medicine they were known to possess. Everythinghad meaning beyond the obvious. The dead were everywhereand their ghosts inhabited the air and memory and theirold haunts, real as ever, if in an only slightly former tense, inconstant need of care and appeasement. They were, like thesaints they'd been named for, prayed over, prayed to, invokedas protection against all enemies, their names recycled throughgenerations, reassigned to new incarnations.
My mother thought I might become a priest. Not because Iwas especially holy; rather, as a devout and Catholic mother ofsix sons and three daughters, she would've known the expectedecclesiastical surtax on so many healthy babies would be a curateor two and maybe a nun to boot. "Be stingy with the Lord andthe Lord will be stingy with you," was the favorite wisdom ofher parish priest and confessor, Father Thomas Kenny, of theGalway Kennys in Threadneedle Road.
* * *
I was named for a dead priest, my father's uncle. Some fewyears after surviving the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, he got"the call." "Vocations follow famine," an old bromide holds.No less the flu? He went to seminary in Detroit and Denverand was ordained in the middle of the Great Depression. Wehave a photo of his First Solemn High Mass on June 10, 1934,at St. John's Church in Jackson, Michigan, a block from theclapboard house he'd grown up in.
His father, my great-grandfather, another Thomas Lynch,did not live to get into this photo of women in print dressesand men in straw boaters on a sunny June Sunday betweenworld wars. My great-grandfather had come from the poortownland of Moveen on the West Clare peninsula that formsthe upper lip of the gaping mouth of the river Shannon—atreeless sloping plain between the ocean and the estuary, itsplots of pasturage divided by hedgerows and intermarriages.He'd come to Michigan for the work available at the huge penitentiarythere in Jackson where he painted cellblocks, workedin the laundry, and finished his career as a uniformed guard.He married Ellen Ryan, herself an immigrant. Together theyraised a daughter who taught, a son who got good work withthe post office, and another who would become a priest—likehitting the trifecta for poor Irish "Yanks," all cushy jobs withreliable pensions. He never saw Ireland again.
In the middle of the retinue of family and parishionersposed for the photo at the doors to the church around theirfreshly minted, homegrown priest, is my father, Edward, agedten years, seated next to his father and mother, bored but obedientin his new knee breeches. Because the young priest—hehas just gone thirty—is sickly but willing, the bishop in Detroitwill send him back out West to the bishop in Santa Fe, who willassign him to the parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Taos, inhopes that the high, dry air of the Sangre de Cristo Mountainsmight ease his upper respiratory ailments and lengthen his days.
The young curate is going to die of pneumonia just twoyears later at the end of July, 1936. The Apache womenwhose babies he baptized, whose sons he taught to playbaseball, whose husbands he preached to, will process hisrough-sawn coffin down the mountains from Taos, alongthe upper reaches of the Rio Grande, through landscapesGeorgia O'Keeffe will make famous, to the Cathedral in SantaFe where Archbishop Rudolph Gerken will preside over hisrequiems, then send his body back to his people, C.O.D., on atrain bound for Michigan and other points east.
A moment that will shape our family destiny for generationsoccurs a few days later in the Desnoyer Funeral Home in Jackson.The dead priest's brother, my grandfather, is meeting withthe undertaker to sort details for the hometown funeral at St.John's. He brings along my father, now twelve years old, for reasonswe can never know. While the two elder men are discussingplots and boxes, pallbearers and honoraria, the boy wandersthrough the old mortuary until he comes to the doorway of aroom where he espies two men in shirtsleeves dressing a corpsein liturgical vestments. He stands and watches quietly. Thenthey carefully lift the freshly vested body of his dead uncle fromthe white porcelain table into a coffin. They turn to see the boyat the door. Ever after my father will describe this moment—thiselevation, this slow, almost ritual hefting of the body—asthe one to which he will always trace his intention to become afuneral director. Perhaps it aligned in his imagination with thatmoment during the masses he attended at St. Francis De Saleswhen the priest would elevate the host and chalice, the putativebody and blood of Christ, when bells were rung, heads bowed,breasts beaten in awe? Might he have conflated the corruptibleand the incorruptible? The mortal and immortality? The sacredand the profane? We have no way to know.
"Why," we would often ask him, "why didn't you decideto become a priest?"
"Well," he would tell us, matter-of-factly, "the priest wasdead."
It was also true that he'd met Rosemary O'Hara that year,a redheaded fifth-grader who would become the girl of hisdreams and who would write him daily when he went off towar with the Marines in the South Pacific; who would marryhim when he came home and mother their nine children andbeside whom he'd be buried half a century later.
"God works in strange ways," my mother would remindus, smiling, passing the spuds, all of us marveling at the waysof things.
And so these "callings," such as they were, these summons toher life as a wife and mother and his to a life as a father and undertaker—alife's work he would always describe as "serving the livingby caring for the dead," or "a corporal work of mercy," or "not justa living, but a way of life." And his sons and daughters and theirsons and daughters, who now operate half a dozen funeral homesin towns all over lower Michigan, were all called to a life of undertaking.And all are tied to that first week of August, 1936 when aboy watched two men lift the body of a dead priest into a box.
How we come to be the ones we are seems a useful studyand lifelong query. Knowing how we got to where we are providessome clues to the perpetual wonder over what it is weare doing here—a question that comes to most of us on a regularbasis. Indeed, a curiosity about one's place and purposekeeps one, speaking now from my own experience, from goingtoo far astray.
"Listen to your life," the writer and minister FrederickBuechner tells us. "See it for the fathomless mystery that it is."
Thus a book that endeavors to say what I've learned fromforty years as a funeral director might well be improved bysome notes on how I came to be one.
"In the boredom and pain of it," Buechner continues, "noless than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smellyour way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the lastanalysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."
All these years later it feels like grace—life itself—chancyas any happenstance, and yet we get these glimpses of a planand purpose behind how we come to be the ones we are.
* * *
Possibly my father was trying to replicate that moment fromhis boyhood for me in mine when he took me to work withhim one Saturday morning when I was eight or ten.
The old funeral home in Highland Park was a storefrontchapel on Woodward Avenue that served mostly a Romanianclientele because the owner, William Vasu, was part ofthat immigrant community. There was an apartment upstairs,offices that flanked the parlors, caskets in the basement, and,at the rear of the building, the embalming room. We parkedbehind the building and entered from the back door whereuponI found myself for the first time in the presence of adead human body. My father had not prepared me for thiswith any memorable warning or precaution. He did not tellme what I was about to encounter. I was simply going to theoffice with him on a Saturday morning. The tall, old man onthe table was covered with a sheet except for his face. His baldhead caught the sunlight from the transom over the door. Theroom was quiet and smelled like the doctor's office. He hadlarge earlobes, a pointed nose, and thick glasses, though it wasclear he would not be reading any more. In my memory of itmy father is standing just beside me. And so I asked what theman's name was, how old he was, how did he die? The tenseshifts are intuitive and provisional. What the answers were arelong since forgotten, but that I was given answers and toldfurther that I should pray for the dead man and for his familywere apparently sufficient on the day, because near as I canfigure I was neither damaged nor traumatized by the experience,only certainly aware of the change of gravity embodiedin the dead man on the table. And there was, ever after,the sense that my father's work had importance and purpose,however imponderable it might have been at the time.
That was another received truth of my father's nunnishupbringing and my own—that life and time were not randomaccretions of happenstance. On the contrary, there was a planfor each and every one of us, and ours was only to discern ourvocation, our calling, our purpose here. No doubt this is howthe life of faith, the search for meaning, the wonder about theway of things first sidles up to the unremarkably curious mind.
When I was seven, my mother sent me off to see the priestto learn enough of the magic Latin—the language of ritualand mystery—to become an altar boy. Father Kenny, our parishpriest, had been at seminary with my father's uncle and hadhatched a plan with my sainted mother to guide me toward theholy orders. This, the two of them no doubt reckoned, was inkeeping with the will of God—that I should fulfill the vocationand finish the work of the croupy and tubercular young man I'dbeen named for. I looked passably hallowed in cassock and surplice,had a knack for the vowel rich acoustics of Latin, and hadalready intuited the accountancy of sin and guilt and shame andpunishment so central to the religious life. This tuition I owedto Father Maguire's Baltimore Catechism and the Sister Servants ofthe Immaculate Heart of Mary, who had prepared me for thegrade school sacraments of Confession and First Holy Communion.I had learned to fast before communion, to confess anddo penance in preparation for the feast, to keep track of my sinsby sort and number, to purge them by prayer and mortification,supplication and petition. To repair the damage done by impurethoughts or cursing at a sibling, a penance of Our Fathers andHail Marys would be assigned. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maximaculpa became for me the breast thumping idioms of forgivenessand purification, atonement, reconciliation and recompense thatare so central to the holy sacrifice of the Mass we Catholic schoolkids daily attended. Thus were the connections early on establishedbetween holiness, blight and blessedness, contrition andredemption; and these powerful religious metaphors gatheredthemselves around the common table. It was all a way to be everready for the unpredictable death that might suddenly claim us.This theater replayed itself each night at our family meals whereour father and our blessed mother would enact a home versionof the sacrifice and feast, the brothers and sisters and I returningprodigals for whom the fatted calf, incarnate as stew or goulash,meatloaves or casseroles had been prepared. On Fridays myfather brought home bags of fish and chips. Whatever our sinswere, they seemed forgiven.
