‘Undertaking’ Offers Matter-Of-Fact Look At Life

“The Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade” By Thomas Lynch ($23, Norton, 202 pages)

When Thomas Lynch was a boy growing up in the Midwest, he used to tell his chums at school that his father, who was the local undertaker, did something that “had to do with holes, with digging holes. And there were bodies involved - dead bodies.”

If that didn’t sink in, he would add: “He takes them under. Get it? Under ground.”

Later, as Lynch grew older and became a funeral director himself, he understood the concept of undertaking less literally, more metaphorically. He was dealing in the basics - that is, in “death and dying and grief and bereavement; the vulnerable underbelly of the hardier nouns: life, liberty, the pursuit of … well, you know” - and he gave the word most closely associated with his occupation a moral meaning: “Undertakings are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisy blather and the blinding dark. It is the voice we give to wonderment, to pain, to love and desire, anger and outrage; the words that we shape into song and prayer.”

Funeral directors are no more likely to be poets than, say, insurance executives, but Lynch is a poet, an “internationally unknown” one, as he modestly puts it, a bit too modestly given that he has published in places like The New Yorker and Paris Review and has read his work in places as far apart as California and Ireland.

In “The Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade,” Lynch reflects charmingly, lyrically, unsentimentally, sardonically on life as seen from the funeral home of the small town of Milford, Mich., where, as he tells us early on, he buries “a couple hundred of my townspeople” each year.

His book does not consist of stories about the funeral home business, though Lynch tells some blunt tales about his main income-producing vocation. “The Undertaking” is a collection of loosely related essays, lighthearted, funny, edged with bitter acceptance, whose main though not exclusive subjects are Lynch himself and death.

The pleasurable discovery is that these subjects prove to be interesting as well as interrelated. Lynch emerges as a cross between Garrison Keillor and one of the Irish poets; one thinks of William Butler Yeats, though Lynch himself probably would not mention himself in company quite that exalted.

He is a Midwesterner by birth and experience, and he tells down-home stories of small-town America, like the one about Mary Jackson of Milford (who played one of the Baldwin sisters on the television series “The Waltons”), and her determined efforts to rebuild the fallen bridge that led to the cemetery. Lynch’s joy in the language, his droll, acid-etched, ruggedly anti-euphemistic, verbally playful sensibility seems to come straight from Ireland, where he owns a cottage and frequently travels.

In any case, as he spins out his meditations, Lynch resorts to a rich, allusive, at times slightly archaic language that seems to go well with the image that he presents of himself, the man in professional black mourning clothes dispensing comfort and homespun wisdom in time of need.

“Between the births and deaths were the courtships - sparkings and spoonings between boys and girls just barely out of their teens, overseen by a maiden aunt who traded her talents for child care and housekeeping for her place in the household,” he writes at one point. This is part of a delectably nostalgic passage about the way modern life has narrowed the scope of that place called home, taking birth, death and courtship out of the parlor and into hospitals and parked cars.

Lynch talks about suicide and the task that falls to the undertaker of cleaning up the mess. Not infrequently, he falls into a satirical mode - perhaps it is necessary for the mental self-preservation of a sensitive man in his particular line of work - as when, for example, he proposes that golf courses be combined with cemeteries to counter our tendency to distance ourselves from the dead. At one point, he provides us with a poem, the one he wrote for the dedication ceremony for the bridge that Jackson succeeded in having built, and it is an eloquent dirge whose theme is the poignancy of everyday life.

He describes corpses, including the tragic corpses of children dead in murders or accidents, or girls raped and slaughtered, maintaining as he does so a disciplined straightforwardness. He talks about the thoughts he had when, putting his professional skills to family use, he embalmed his own father.

Running through his various essays is a theme, if one that only loosely binds Lynch’s various ruminations. Underlying his slender volume is a conservative moral philosophy. As an undertaker, Lynch needs to stop for death, as Emily Dickinson put it, but he is also in a position to see how modern life, with its plastic wrappings and vicarious experiences, has a tendency to isolate us not only from death and dying but from other fundamentals of life as well.

The philosophy is hinted at early on as Lynch gives us his definition of undertaking. It becomes more explicit near the end with a vitriolic, sarcastic attack on Jack Kevorkian, who happens to live in the same Michigan county as Lynch.

“Where choice is enshrined, we must suffer the choices,” Lynch writes. “Where life is sacred, we must suffer the life.”