The figure most
often and most conspicuously missing from the insurance charts and demographics
is the one I call THE BIG ONE, which refers to the number of people out of
every one hundred born who will die. Over the long haul, THE BIG ONE hovers
right around ... well – dead nuts on 100. If this were on the charts, they
would call it ‘Death expectancy’ and no one would buy futures of any kind. But
it is a useful number and has its lessons. Maybe you will want to figure out
what to do with your life. Maybe it will make you feel a certain kinship with
the rest of us. Maybe it will make you hysterical. Whatever the implications of
a 100 per cent death expectancy, calculate how big a town this is and why it
produces for me steady, if sometimes unpredictable, labour.
“Every
year I bury one hundred and fifty of my townspeople,” says Thomas Lynch at the
start of his collection of essays, The
Undertaking, “another dozen or two I take to the crematory to be burned. I
sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a side line in
headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission.” Lynch runs the family owned funeral business
Lynch & Sons in the small town of Milford, Michigan. In his black homburg, white
shirt, black bow tie, black three piece suit and wire frame glasses he looks
like an undertaker who has just wandered in from the 19th Century. He
sometimes writes like it too – but please note that isn’t a criticism. When he
isn’t undertaking Lynch is also a poet, an “internationally unknown” one he
claims here, but that isn’t quite true. He has published, internationally, at
least four books of poetry, a volume of short stories and three collections of
essays. As a poet he is reasonably well known, as a funeral director, he has to
be a megastar. There aren’t many famous funerary professionals that is true,
and he perhaps isn’t as celebrated as Caitlin Doughty, but this book,
originally published in 1997, sold well in the States and made him a recognised
name with that part of the general public blessed with morbid inclinations.
When,
in the essay pithily entitled ‘Crapper’ (after Thomas Crapper, supposed
inventor of the flush toilet) Lynch draws
parallels between the changes in attitudes towards the disposal of excrement
and of the dead since Victorian times, noting our modern aversion to any of the
‘sights and sounds and odors that remind us of the corruptibility of the flesh’,
he sounds like a potential recruit for Doughty’s Order of the Good Death. But the old fashioned Catholic Midwesterner and
the breezy Californian are poles apart. The fear of death, he says, “is
something anyone in their right mind has. It is healthy. It keeps us from
playing in the traffic. I say it’s a thing we should pass on to the kids.” His
essentially conservative moral stance sometimes draws the ire of the more
liberally inclined of his compatriots. In a fascinating essay Lynch discusses Jack Kevorkian, a fellow resident of Michigan
and pro euthanasia campaigner dubbed Dr Death by the media, who invented a device,
the Thanatron, to enable the terminally ill to kill themselves and who
personally assisted at the death of 130 people. Kevorkian was a hugely controversial
figure and Lynch draws a very different picture of him to the one presented in
the 2010 TV film ‘You Don’t Know Jack’ which starred Al Pacino. He also compares euthanasia to abortion in
terms of the moral complexities involved, a view that infuriates his critics.
The Undertaking is beautifully written,
decidedly literary, absorbing and often very funny. Recommended.
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