HOUSE OF MOURNING

THOMAS LYNCH, POET AND UNDERTAKER, REFLECTS ON HIS `DISMAL TRADE'

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, July 27, 1997

Page: N14

Section: Books

The mainstream literature on the topic is surprisingly scant, when you consider how many writers cast about daily for a subject that matters. Oh, you have centuries of poetry at one end of the spectrum, contemporary classics like Jessica Mitford's ``The American Way of Death'' and Sherwin B. Nuland's ``How We Die'' at the other. But how often does one get a glimpse at what goes on within the satin-and-steel cloisters of the funeral home? We bring an array of emotional associations with us when we even consider this dark place, among them fear, sorrow, denial, revulsion, and great upheaval. Thomas Lynch has witnessed them all, along with the equally lingering sights of crematoriums, destroyed craniums, and grieving mothers. More important, he has stood there, too, while love and song and the work of living have paved the way for death to hurt in due measure. Or, in his simple words: ``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.''

Imagine, then, the day the ground is turned for somebody you love -- it happens to all of us, all life long, though sooner and more often for some than for others -- and imagine, too, the orchestrator of the program notes that will get you through those first unimaginable days. Lynch & Sons of Milford (a township of 15,000) is a family business: Lynch's father was a funeral director; five of his eight siblings work in the profession. And for those of us who wonder, typically, how someone could consider such work his calling, Lynch provides a wallop of explanation at the beginning of ``Undertaking'': He has no more taste for horror and calamity, he tells us, than does an oncologist or a preacher. It is his job, he believes, to hold the door on our way out.

Some of the essays in ``Undertaking'' have previously been published in the London Review of Books and Harper's, which gives you an idea of the sensibility behind them. Lynch is a literary man, but he is most of all a sentient one, conscious of the miseries and gross ironies and fireflies of transcendence that await us every day. He writes, accordingly, of the wounds and failings that have touched his own life: divorce, alcoholism, the cancer that took his mother, and the hours of preparing his father for burial. He writes of driving to the hospital in the middle of the night to pick up the body of a man he calls Milo, who owned a laundromat, and who once sent his van around to pick up Lynch's laundry -- the two hardly knew each other -- when Lynch was a newly divorced father with four young children. He writes of driving his 89-year-old Aunt Nora home to die in County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland, listening all the way to her singing ``The Cliffs of Moveen'' and ``Amazing Grace.'' And he writes of his own fatherly fear evoked by tending to the deaths of the young -- of the great and terrible knowledge that when children die, they take a piece of the future along with them.

All of which must suggest that ``Undertaking'' is a grim and difficult book to read; it isn't. Some of the stories Lynch conveys may be of near-unfathomable pain, but his consolations are real, in part because he has walked the walk. He seems unafraid of grief; he offers no cheap relief, in either saccharine promises or understatement; he celebrates the stars and the dirt that illustrate the inevitable journey to the grave. He can do all this while explaining the difference between a coffin and a casket, both etymologically and financially, or while describing the noble sentiment behind the funeral pyres of Calcutta and Bombay. No stranger to the craters of loss his work attends, he takes us through his own grief and denial at his mother's death -- then tells us, with gentle simplicity, of the elderly woman who came by to pick up her younger sister's ashes, fastening them inside the passenger seat belt before she drove away.

One would assume either God or Art saves Thomas Lynch from an overdose of sorrow, and while it is true that the first is granted a nod, it is poetry -- the redemptive force of language -- that gets his final bow. He is not so much coy about the possibility of the divine (which, let's face it, would be an easy out for a funeral director) as he is humbly unknowing: ``But faith is, so far as I know it, the only known cure for fear.'' That's good enough for Lynch on some days, he admits; on others, there is instead the perhaps-God-given gift of words -- the brick and mortar of eulogies, vows, promises kept. Attending the mystery of the ordinary, he watches a poem cross the Atlantic and change the life of a broken-hearted man. None of his affinity for the intangible detracts from his hard-earned realism: This is a man who once painted a bedroom in the middle of the night, so that a suicide victim's children wouldn't have to see the room he'd left behind.

The only note in ``Undertaking'' that sometimes rings too sharp is the dark wit Lynch displays in the face of what he loathes. His essay on Jack Kevorkian, and his satires on the idiocy of cultural efforts to hide the stony truths of death, have about them a pitch of indignation that seems too frenzied for the sage acuity behind this book. But his endnotes to ``Undertaking'' -- a brief acknowledgment of his own mortality -- simply confirm a feeling I had throughout these essays: that Thomas Lynch, poet and undertaker, is a good man to have around, and not just because he'd be there on the day you needed him.

THOMAS LYNCH

From ``The Undertaking''