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A review by lpm100
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
"The Undertaking"
Thomas Lynch
5/5 stars
"Brilliant prose craftsmen and wordsmiths are hidden in plain sight--a funeral director, in this case."
*******
This is a book written by a funeral director right here in Michigan that was so good, he had a PBS special made about his line of work.
I also believe that this book is an antidote to the very popular Jessica Mitford book "The American Way in Death." (I don't think it's exactly novel that funeral homes or businesses like any other and they need to turn the profit to stay alive.)
******
What I see here are multiple threads, all of which are connected by some inner necessity of the author to write.
1. A philosophical / spiritual journal.
2. A memory journal of someone one with decades of experience and multiple generations in the funeral industry. (Who wouldn't think there'd be a story there?)
3. A book of poetry.
4. A travelogue. (The author is first generation American and still has family and property back in Ireland.)
No one of them is enough.
Any two could potentially be enough.
But three or more come together to create a splendid structure.
*******
Who knew that a funeral director could talk like this?
I will let the writing in the book speak for yourself.
QUOTES:
1. Heartbreak is an invisible affliction. No limp comes with it, no evidence scar. No sticker is issued that guarantees good parking or easy access. The heart is broken all the same. (p.64)
2. But if women in their twenties will trade favor for poems and warm to the easy duty of muses, by 30 they grow wary and by 40 regard it as an invasion of privacy and politically incorrect. They won't be muses. They have their own version of the story. (p.62)
3. When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we sometimes imagine better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.... But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves in the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. (p.51)
4. In the room where Mrs Regan's body was, despite the candles and the flowers in the February chill-- a good thing in the townlands where no embalming is done - - there was the terrible odor of gastrointestinal distress. Beneath the fine linens, Mrs Regan's belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Later I heard comment in the hushed din of gossip, that Mrs Regan..... had made her dinner the day before unboiled cabbage and onions and ham and later followed with several half pints of lager. (p.39)
5. I sometimes think the only firms to put their names on what they do anymore are firms that make toilets and direct funerals. (p.34)
6. But seeing him, outstretched on the embalming table with the cardiac blue in his ears and fingertips along his distal regions, I thought, this is what my father would look like when he's dead. And then, like a door slammed shut behind you, the tense of it all shifted into the inescapable present of: this is my father, dead. (p.23)
7. Embalming my father I was reminded of how we bury our dead and then become them. In the end I had to say that maybe this is what I'm going to look like dead. (ibid)
8. He was sharing a condo with a woman who always overestimated the remedial powers of sexual aerobics. Or maybe she only underestimated the progress of his heart disease. We all knew it was coming. In the two years of consortium that followed, he'd had a major heart attack every 6 months like clockwork. He survived all but one. (p.19)
9. There is a belief that I, being the undertaker here, have some irregular fascination with, special interest in, inside information about, even attachment to, the dead..... And I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad teeth, the doctor to your rotten entrance, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records. (p.8)
10. Once you are dead, put your feet up, call it a day, and let the husband or the Mrs or the kids or a sibling decide whether you are to be buried or burned or blown out of a cannon or left to dry out in a ditch somewhere. It's not your day to watch it, because the dead don't care. (ibid)
11. The doctor pressed the stethoscope in the usual places, and after considerable silence pronounced his diagnosis: "Eddie, I can't find a thing wrong with you." Whereupon Eddie, ever contentious, slumped to the floor, turned purple, and died in an instant, proving for all in attendance, once and for all, the fallibility of modern medicine, and the changeability of life in general. (p.140).
12. If the past is a province the aged revisit and the future is one that the child dreams, birth and death are the oceans that bound them. And midlife is the moment between them, that frontier when it seems as if we could go either way, when our view is as good on either side.
13. It happened for me one night some years ago. Is it needless to say we had just made love? I was propped on my elbows looking out of the window.... We had buried my mother that morning..... And there, for a moment, I could see it all that night. Between the dead body of the woman who had given me life and the live body of the woman who made me feel alive, I had a glimpse of my history back to my birth at a glimpse of the future that would end in my death. (p.148)
14. Revision and prediction seem like waste of time. As much as I'd like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. (ibid)
15. In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time. Reality is customized just to fit the person or the situation. There is your reality and my reality, the truth as they see it, but what is real and true for us all eludes us. (p.159).
16. Assisted suicide and abortion are as near to mirror images of the same existential concerns as life in this century will provide. And if a review of the last quarter century living with safe and legal abortion did not tell us exactly how to settle the current debate, it surely tells us how we shouldn't..... Left to chance, if we cower from the difficult issues, we get Kevorkian or a variation on his pathological if oddly cartoonish theme. (p.170)
17. "The slippery slope argument!" someone always says--as if to say it is to nullify it. As if things don't go from bad to worse. As if gravity did not exist.
18. When someone dies, we try to get a handle on it. This is because dead folks don't move. I'm not making this part up. Next time someone in your house quits breathing, ask them to get up and answer the phone or maybe get you some ice water or let the cat out. He won't budge. It's because he's dead.(p.181)
19. On the subject of money: you get what you pay for. Deal with someone who's instincts you trust. If anyone tells you you haven't spent enough, tell them to go piss up a rope. (p.196)
Verdict: recommended. Probably about 3 to 4 hours of reading time.
*******
Vocabulary
epithalamium
carillon
gerundive
sepia colored
intellection
vale (vs. veil)
domain
somatic death
metabolic death
shirred
coffin vs casket
PietÃ
"The Undertaking"
Thomas Lynch
5/5 stars
"Brilliant prose craftsmen and wordsmiths are hidden in plain sight--a funeral director, in this case."
*******
This is a book written by a funeral director right here in Michigan that was so good, he had a PBS special made about his line of work.
I also believe that this book is an antidote to the very popular Jessica Mitford book "The American Way in Death." (I don't think it's exactly novel that funeral homes or businesses like any other and they need to turn the profit to stay alive.)
******
What I see here are multiple threads, all of which are connected by some inner necessity of the author to write.
1. A philosophical / spiritual journal.
2. A memory journal of someone one with decades of experience and multiple generations in the funeral industry. (Who wouldn't think there'd be a story there?)
3. A book of poetry.
4. A travelogue. (The author is first generation American and still has family and property back in Ireland.)
No one of them is enough.
Any two could potentially be enough.
But three or more come together to create a splendid structure.
*******
Who knew that a funeral director could talk like this?
I will let the writing in the book speak for yourself.
QUOTES:
1. Heartbreak is an invisible affliction. No limp comes with it, no evidence scar. No sticker is issued that guarantees good parking or easy access. The heart is broken all the same. (p.64)
2. But if women in their twenties will trade favor for poems and warm to the easy duty of muses, by 30 they grow wary and by 40 regard it as an invasion of privacy and politically incorrect. They won't be muses. They have their own version of the story. (p.62)
3. When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we sometimes imagine better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.... But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves in the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. (p.51)
4. In the room where Mrs Regan's body was, despite the candles and the flowers in the February chill-- a good thing in the townlands where no embalming is done - - there was the terrible odor of gastrointestinal distress. Beneath the fine linens, Mrs Regan's belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Later I heard comment in the hushed din of gossip, that Mrs Regan..... had made her dinner the day before unboiled cabbage and onions and ham and later followed with several half pints of lager. (p.39)
5. I sometimes think the only firms to put their names on what they do anymore are firms that make toilets and direct funerals. (p.34)
6. But seeing him, outstretched on the embalming table with the cardiac blue in his ears and fingertips along his distal regions, I thought, this is what my father would look like when he's dead. And then, like a door slammed shut behind you, the tense of it all shifted into the inescapable present of: this is my father, dead. (p.23)
7. Embalming my father I was reminded of how we bury our dead and then become them. In the end I had to say that maybe this is what I'm going to look like dead. (ibid)
8. He was sharing a condo with a woman who always overestimated the remedial powers of sexual aerobics. Or maybe she only underestimated the progress of his heart disease. We all knew it was coming. In the two years of consortium that followed, he'd had a major heart attack every 6 months like clockwork. He survived all but one. (p.19)
9. There is a belief that I, being the undertaker here, have some irregular fascination with, special interest in, inside information about, even attachment to, the dead..... And I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad teeth, the doctor to your rotten entrance, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records. (p.8)
10. Once you are dead, put your feet up, call it a day, and let the husband or the Mrs or the kids or a sibling decide whether you are to be buried or burned or blown out of a cannon or left to dry out in a ditch somewhere. It's not your day to watch it, because the dead don't care. (ibid)
11. The doctor pressed the stethoscope in the usual places, and after considerable silence pronounced his diagnosis: "Eddie, I can't find a thing wrong with you." Whereupon Eddie, ever contentious, slumped to the floor, turned purple, and died in an instant, proving for all in attendance, once and for all, the fallibility of modern medicine, and the changeability of life in general. (p.140).
12. If the past is a province the aged revisit and the future is one that the child dreams, birth and death are the oceans that bound them. And midlife is the moment between them, that frontier when it seems as if we could go either way, when our view is as good on either side.
13. It happened for me one night some years ago. Is it needless to say we had just made love? I was propped on my elbows looking out of the window.... We had buried my mother that morning..... And there, for a moment, I could see it all that night. Between the dead body of the woman who had given me life and the live body of the woman who made me feel alive, I had a glimpse of my history back to my birth at a glimpse of the future that would end in my death. (p.148)
14. Revision and prediction seem like waste of time. As much as I'd like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. (ibid)
15. In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time. Reality is customized just to fit the person or the situation. There is your reality and my reality, the truth as they see it, but what is real and true for us all eludes us. (p.159).
16. Assisted suicide and abortion are as near to mirror images of the same existential concerns as life in this century will provide. And if a review of the last quarter century living with safe and legal abortion did not tell us exactly how to settle the current debate, it surely tells us how we shouldn't..... Left to chance, if we cower from the difficult issues, we get Kevorkian or a variation on his pathological if oddly cartoonish theme. (p.170)
17. "The slippery slope argument!" someone always says--as if to say it is to nullify it. As if things don't go from bad to worse. As if gravity did not exist.
18. When someone dies, we try to get a handle on it. This is because dead folks don't move. I'm not making this part up. Next time someone in your house quits breathing, ask them to get up and answer the phone or maybe get you some ice water or let the cat out. He won't budge. It's because he's dead.(p.181)
19. On the subject of money: you get what you pay for. Deal with someone who's instincts you trust. If anyone tells you you haven't spent enough, tell them to go piss up a rope. (p.196)
Verdict: recommended. Probably about 3 to 4 hours of reading time.
*******
Vocabulary
epithalamium
carillon
gerundive
sepia colored
intellection
vale (vs. veil)
domain
somatic death
metabolic death
shirred
coffin vs casket
PietÃ