The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

By Thomas Lynch

Book Overview

"Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople." So opens this singular and wise testimony. Like all poets, inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ear tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve pieces his is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the condolences and shapes the questions posed by this familiar mystery. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are the lessons for life our mortality teaches us.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393041123
• ISBN13: 9780393041125
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.1" x 0.9" x 5.4"

Customer Reviews

This Book is a Gift

When I finished reading this book, I immediately started over again from the beginning. It is beautifully and sensitively written, providing an insight into the "dismal trade" as no one ever has before. For example, Mr. Lynch writes eloquently of an embalmer's gift to a murdered child's mother, describing how the embalmer had "retrieved her death from the one who had killed her." It is one of those books that stays with you...that somehow makes an imprint on your very soul.

Life Studies from the Dismal Trade is the key phrase.....

Life Studies from the Dismal Trade is the subtitle of Thomas Lynch's extraordinary collection of essays. It says far more about the substance of this book than the title itself.Lynch is the sole funeral director in Milford, Michigan. As such, as he states in his opening, he "buries a couple of hundred of his towns people". It is not, an occasional aside notwithstanding, the technical aspects of his job that lynch focuses on here, however. As the subtitle suggests, it is the living that concern Mr. Lynch, and, in fact, as an undertaker, it is the living, not the dead, he truly serves. For, as he is wont to point out, the dead don't care.The living, on the other hand, care a great deal. Especially in cases of tragic, unforeseen death. The young murder victim's family, the suicide's family, and so on.Mr. Lynch is a published poet. So his essays are not the dry stuff of technical journals, but rater elegant, philosophical expositions on the nature of death, the nature of survival, and the nature of his profession.One would think that this would be a rather depressing read but, in fact, it is anything but.I have recommended the book to many friends-boomers like myself with aging parents. Reading this book helped me to deal more effectively with my own parent's deaths. It helps one put some perspective on the rituals that we observe attendant to death. That it manages to inform and entertain as well is a remarkable achievement.

I picked it up on a bargain table.....

and found it to be one of the most beautifully written books I've yet read. In going through a time where I've been caught up in examining the deeper issues of my own life, this small book spoke a great deal to what was going on in my head and heart. Not death, per se, but rather life and enjoying it, trying to make sense of it. Mr. Lynch examines a subject we in America too often prefer not to deal with - the aftermath of death; the process that begins immediately after the departing of the spirit.Beautifully, sensitively written. I'm going to buy it as a birthday present for a close friend. READ IT! It's really not morbid! :)

The Pathos & Humor of Dealing with Death

Perhaps it is Thomas Lynch's Irish heritage that shines through and illuminates his views of death. He certainly has the fabled Irish way with words, and can turn a phrase with the best. One of my favorites is: "The poor cousin of fear is anger."Lynch also exhibits the traditional Irish inclination to find humor even in the deepest throes of sorrow. Ironies abound in this work. His career as an undertaker has made him familiar with death, perhaps too familiar for his liking at times, so he can be matter-of-fact about it, but never disrespectful. The man's writing has some of the qualities of the prototypical Irish wake, at once keening for the loss of friends and neighbors and celebrating the lives of those left behind. Those are the qualities that make this slender volume (202 4-3/4 by 7-3/4" pages) such a valuble work. For this reader, at least, it provided a new perspective on death and "the dismal trade" that Lynch practices. It well deserved its spot as Runner-up in the National Book Awards. I recommend it to you.

Every year I try to pick my own "Book of the Year."

Every year I try to pick my own "Book of the Year." This started out as a way of picking an annual Xmas gift for my sister-in-law. Now it has become my own personal way of ranking books I have read. Though it is only late October and, though I had yet another book in mind, Lynch wins. I had heard him read a section of this book on a C-Span reading and bought it. But it sat unread on my shelf for close to a year. This past week, I was hungry for something good to read and so grabbed it pretty much at random. For the next three days, I used every spare moment of my time to finish it. Each essay convinced me that it alone was the best. And, except for the anti- Jessica Mitford diatribe near the end, it was hard to find any essay not to be a personal favorite in one way or another. While ostensibly about the funeral business-past and present--it is certainly about a great deal more. I found myself reading whole sections of it aloud to friends, with great excitement. Wonderful, rich writing.