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'The Undertaking' (Death Through The Eyes Of A Poet Undertaker)

'The Undertaking' (Death Through The Eyes Of A Poet Undertaker)	791 Views
posted on Monday, November 12, 2007

EDITOR'S COMMENT:

So what do we do with death, that most unsettling of human topics and experiences? If you are FRONTLINE, you track down a three generation undertaker who is also a world class poet. Then you follow him and his family as they go about the business of dealing with the dead and dying, and, more importantly, those who are left behind. And to add color, depth, and first-person perspective, you build your story around the undertaker's poetry, which discusses, among other things, how he, as a young father, provided caskets and other funeral services at cost to the families of children who died. Why? In the hopes that God would spare him "the hollowing grief" of the parents whose children he helped bury. And to be sure your viewers know what the undertaker means by "hollowing grief", you also film a young mother and father who struggle, on camera -- before, during, and after -- with the passing of their 24-month old baby.

This is a short way of saying that FRONTILINE has created a documentary about death that is something special -- a disarmingly honest look at death from many different angles. I hope everyone on this list will take the time to watch. You can watch all of it online, along with several compelling companion interviews:

http://www.pbs.org/frontline/undertaking

--- David Sunfellow

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"Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople. Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned ... I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes ... I am the only undertaker in this town." -- Thomas Lynch

FRONTLINE presents
THE UNDERTAKING
First Aired Tuesday, October 30, 2007

http://www.pbs.org/frontline/undertaking

FRONTLINE's The Undertaking, enters the world of Thomas Lynch, a writer, poet and undertaker whose family for three generations has cared for both the living and the dead in a small Michigan town. Through the intimate stories of families coming to terms with grief, mortality, and a funeral's rituals, the film illuminates the heartbreak and beauty in the journey taken between the living and the dead when a loved one dies.

.............

Thomas Lynch, 58, is a writer and a poet. He's also a funeral director in a small town in central Michigan where he and his family have cared for the dead -- and the living -- for three generations. For the first time, Lynch agreed to allow cameras inside Lynch & Sons, giving FRONTLINE producers Miri Navasky and Karen O'Connor rare, behind-the-scenes access -- from funeral arrangements to the embalming room -- to the Lynches' world in The Undertaking.

In his critically acclaimed book, "The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade" <http://tinyurl.com/2oyw7n>, excerpted in this film, Lynch chronicles a life spent in the presence of the dead. "We have in some ways become estranged from death and the dead," Lynch believes. "We're among the first couple generations for whom the presence of the dead at their own funerals has become optional. And I see that as probably not good news for the culture at large."

The Lynch family believes that the rituals of a funeral are more than mere formalities. "Funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters," Lynch contends. "A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be."

Often people come to Lynch & Sons long before a death. "My mother had a little stroke about a month ago, and those things make you think more about what's going to happen and how you're going to arrange it," says Anna Dugan, a retired nurse who came to the Lynches' to pick out a casket. For Dugan's 89-year-old mother, protection, even in death, is important. "She doesn't want water inside her casket. So if she's buried in the ground and it's a wet season of the year, she wants to stay dry."

And it's not just the elderly who face these difficult decisions. Anthony and Nevada Verrino, both in their early 30s, came to Thomas Lynch to talk about funeral plans for their only child, Anthony, who was born in 2004 with a rare genetic syndrome. Although baby Anthony, 24 months old, has defied expectations and come back from the brink of death several times, they know he won't live long, and they speak with remarkable candor about his imminent death. "We still get the question, 'Well, why isn't he -- why isn't he eating?'" says Anthony, the baby's father. "And my answer is, 'Because he's dying. You know, because he's dying.'"

"When we're planning ahead," says the young mother, "it might even be in some ways a survival mechanism, because for us it gives us ... steps and procedures of how to do something." Yet the Verrinos also recognize that nothing they do will fully prepare them. "I've spent two years with a very sick baby ... whose prognosis has never been bright," Nevada tells FRONTLINE. "But when I sit and think about the day waking up when he's gone, I can't -- I can't prepare for that completely, you know."

Before his father's death, David King had been skeptical about many funeral rituals. "I went into it with a lot of reservations, ... and the viewing of someone's body with makeup and all the stuff that goes along with that can be a really strange, alienating thing. ... I thought the funeral would be a necessary custom, that we'd just have to get through it, [but] it ended up being a real comfort."

For Lynch and his family, their business has always been about more than just caring for the dead. "What I've written is that while the dead don't care, the dead matter," Lynch explains. "The dead matter to the living. In accompanying the dead, getting them where they need to go, we get where we need to be -- to the edge of that oblivion and then returned to life with the certain knowledge that life has changed."

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AN INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS LYNCH

Original Link

Thomas Lynch is a writer and a poet. For more than 30 years he also has been the director of the Lynch & Sons funeral home in the small town of Milford, Mich. It has always been a family-owned and -operated firm, founded by Thomas Lynch's father, Edward Joseph Lynch. The Milford location is one of six Lynch funeral homes in the state. This is the edited transcript of interviews conducted with hin during the winter and spring of 2006-2007.

.............

Frontline: What does your funeral home represent for this town?

Thomas Lynch: In many ways we represent the place where whatever conversation people want to have about death and dying and grief and bereavement. Whether in the most abstract sense or in the most particular, this is a safe harbor, a place they can have that conversation. And oftentimes I'm impressed by how people will wrap their existential concerns about a dying parent in the prearrangement conference. They need to talk to someone. And for those who are unchurched or unfamiliar in any tradition that gives them sort of the framework for this, a funeral home is still a safe place to talk about matters mortuary and matters of mortality.

So people come in to talk about arranging their parents' funerals or their own. They come in to talk about what to do with a child who's grieving because a schoolmate died, to talk about what will happen in the event of their own death, how to handle a dying parent, nursing home arrangements, elder care. All these things are part of the ongoing conversation that we here have.

Frontline: What age were you when you really seriously thought you might become a funeral director, and how much of your dad's influence was a part of that decision?

Thomas Lynch: When you grow up in funeral service, you always have a job. But at some point it becomes more than a job, and I can see this happening to the young people who have come here to work as high school students on work-study programs. I've seen it happen to Sean [his son], where you're swinging the door at night, helping people with their coats, directing them one place or another, carrying flowers, doing all the innocuous little things that add up to taking care of a family during visitation. But when some widowed person comes out and takes you by the shoulders and said, "Thank you, I couldn't have done this without you," and all you did was be there, or answer the call, or show up, there's this deep sense of having been of use to people at a time of need. And that's very seductive, because, I mean, it's human-to-human contact.

So what I find is that before people bring their expertise as an embalmer or as a manager or as an executive or as a director, before any expertise, you ante up your humanity, you know? If you're playing human to human, you'll do fine. But you have to do that first, because people will sense if you're not willing to do that, if you're just sort of going through the motions. People will know that.

So for me, I can remember swinging the door all through my teen years, and I think it was 1973 -- I was probably 24 or 25 years old [when I decided].

Frontline: In terms of the practical details, what are some of the things you learned from your dad?

Thomas Lynch: Well, we wear black for funerals -- people have to know who the directors are, who to ask -- and white shirts and gray ties. And my father did have a sense of formality and tradition when it came to funerals. He liked the idea that the culture had sort of organized these wheels, in some way liturgically, in some ways socially. But he said, "When a death occurs, people feel so helpless, it's good to have some of these things already invented." He would have probably had a difficult way of managing some of the changes that we see nowadays. He would have thought much of it ridiculous and much of it sublime. He would have figured that out, but I think for him the funeral, the procession, was part of the process.

I think he was keenly aware of the fact that a good funeral is not about what we buy or what we spend; ... that a good funeral is very much about what we do when someone dies. He always knew that the real traffic was between the living and the dead, and it is in managing that and emboldening the living to deal with their dead that you do them the most service. So it's not like you do things for them as much as you do it with them and embolden them to do for themselves. He had a very good sense of that.

Frontline: Give me a sense of the changes in attitudes toward death in America.

Thomas Lynch: I think we're among the first couple generations for whom the presence of the dead at their funerals has become optional, and I see that as probably not good news for the culture at large.

Up until a couple generations ago, humans were the species that dealt with death, the idea of the thing, by dealing with their dead, the thing itself, so that the way we processed mortality was by processing mortals from one place to the other, one station to the next in this little pilgrimage between as they were to how they are to what we hope they'll be. And this movement, emotionally, is mirrored by a physical movement. The bearing of it is so very, very important.

Sometime in the mid-60s, probably having a lot to do with Jessica Mitford's book [The American Way of Death] and a lot to do with other social factors, there was sort of the triumphalist American sense that we didn't have to deal with any discomforts. We saw people start organizing these commemorative events to which everyone was invited but the dead guy. The finger food was good, the talk was uplifting, the music was life-affirming; someone, usually the reverend clergy, could be counted on to declare closure, usually just before the Merlot ran out, and everyone was there but the one who had died.

And we come away from these memorial events, these celebrations of life, with the increasing sense that something is missing. And something is. What is missing is the corpse: the thing itself, not the idea of the thing.

Frontline: Are social changes the reasons that we are more fearful and reluctant to deal with death in our everyday lives?

Thomas Lynch: I think we're all complicit in the banishment of the dead to the peripheries. In some ways it is a culture that's based on convenience and cost efficiency. It's a culture that doesn't like to be reminded of mortality.

Frontline: And why do the rituals of a funeral matter? Where is the meaning?

Thomas Lynch: I think we act out things that are hard to put in words. People will sometimes ask me about the connections between poetry and funerals, and I do see this huge connection between the use of language in the two of them and how both rely on ritual and symbol and metaphor. Both [are part of] this effort to say something about something unspeakable -- great love, great loss, great hope, great fear, great doubt, the fist we shake in God's face, asking him, "What did you have in mind here?"

Frontline: And when we talk about "the procession," what is the meaning of that?

Thomas Lynch: I like the connection, the sound of the word "process"; it suggests movement, a pilgrimage. You can read in history books about the way a funeral procession was laid out -- which civic group, which ecclesiastical group, which fraternal group, which family group -- how everybody was lined up, so that as people walked in, there was this rise and fall of relationship and grief, and people know this, that good, orderly direction that was assumed by this process, this ritual. I think it suggests that we're going to get from one place to the other, whatever it is that we have to do to process this new reality, to get the dead to the edge of their changed role and get the living to the edge of this new changed life that they're going to lead without this person in their lives anymore.

So this pilgrimage, this journey that we go on, replicates in many ways other journeys that we see in life, from infancy to toddlerhood, from toddlerhood to teenagers to adulthood, the journeys we take in life in our heart, in the life of our mind, the life of our spirit. In many ways they're all replicated by this journey that we take between the living and the dead when someone dies, this procession.

Sometimes it's as simple as going up the street, down the block, into the church, out of that building, over to the bridge, over the river, over to the graveyard. In doing this, in accompanying the dead, getting them where they need to go, we get where we need to be. And I've seen it work, I've seen it work. It's a kind of theater, I suppose. ...

Frontline: And the things we have to do in that period of two days or three days, that's also largely what you do for us, is that right?

Thomas Lynch: I don't know what my part of it is, except it's duty, detail: Show up, do this, do that, be sure the car starts, keep it clean, you know, that type of thing.

But it's not just my job. I'm the guy that has the hearse, but there's someone else in town who is making a strawberry rhubarb pie to bring to the luncheon afterward, and that's what she's doing on the day. And there's somebody else digging the hole in the ground. And there's somebody else trying to get the choir to sing in tune. And there's somebody else arranging the flowers. And there's somebody else doing this, that. And somebody else is pressing somebody's clothes.

It's ridiculous, it's mundane, it's stupid, but at the end of the day what we are trying to do is assemble all our metaphoric weapons to do battle with this hurt, this still thing. And it works; it does work. I mean, there are good funerals. I've seen at the end of the day people walking upright away from graves, people walking upright away from fires, as if they were going to survive it.

And they won't forget, and that's the thing. I mean, if it was just a matter of forgetting, we would do that. We'd just say, "Well, let's not think about that anymore." But people will go home, and they will look at pictures of the dead; they'll look at movies of the dead; they'll quote the dead to one another; and they will weep and laugh and carry on. They'll survive it. All to the good, I say.

Frontline: And is that the purposefulness in the ebb and flow of a wake and a funeral?

Thomas Lynch: Oh, yeah. Isn't that awful? "Life goes on!" I mean, that is the terrible, terrible part. I know as a person who has grieved before, and I also know as a person who has been next to people in grief, that one of the awful messages on the day is "Life goes on." The stores are open. The till still rings. The stock market is open. Everything is going on, and here we are. So yeah, it is the good news and the bad news. It is the ridiculous and the sublime. It is that everything changes and nothing changes. Yeah, it's a mystery.

Frontline: And what about the formalities, the particular traditions and customs that are a part of the funeral?

Thomas Lynch: It is really helpful on the day your mother dies or your father dies or, God help us, a child dies, to have a certain part of the wheel already invented. If I'm an Italian Catholic or an Orthodox Jew or a Baptist African American, I don't have to wonder what's going to happen, because I know that my community of co-religionists, of ethnic fellows, my neighborhood, whatever, they've organized a plan so that I don't have to spend the first several hours or days or weeks trying to figure out what to do next because it's already been told by tradition, by custom, by culture, by form. And most good customs allow for some wiggle room, you know. ...

I have often noticed the difference between the first day that a family will spend here and the next day. When my father died, I was not prepared to put him in the ground then. But by the time a couple days later he went in the ground, it was exactly the right thing to do. I'm certain the same thing holds for people who put their dead in the sea or the fire or a tomb -- that we need time to disengage. I think they used to call that "social death"; that actual death happens like that. We get to say when people are dead to us, or dead enough, so that we can let them go.

Frontline: Are most Americans still being buried?

Thomas Lynch: Burial was the norm in the Western world probably until the mid-60s. But cremation has increased since then by about 10 percent in every decade. I think the national rate now is right around 38 percent. Here in Milford we're around 40 percent, and there are places where it's 60 percent and places where it's 16 percent. But there's no question that cremation has become normative in a way that it used to be exceptional.

Frontline: And does the rise in cremation in America parallel changes in demographics?

Thomas Lynch: I think cremation very much is like us. It follows the changes in our species, certainly in our culture. We are less grounded than our grandparents were. We are more mobile, more portable, more scattered. So in a sense, cremation suits us in that way.

What we have missed, however, in cremation in this culture is all the powerful metaphoric values provided by fire, its elemental worth. Whether a person is consigned to the earth or the fire is, at the end of the day, no difference. Whether we consign our dead to scavenger birds, as they do in Tibet, or to the sea, as they do when the sea is around them, or the tree, as our Native Americans did, it doesn't make any difference. The oblivion is the oblivion wherever it is. The elements are the elements.

Frontline: For many people I know, when families are cremated, they feel as if they've in some sense kind of disappeared. ...

Thomas Lynch: Well, if you ask any group of ordinary citizens, "How many here have attended a cremation?" there are very few hands raised in the room, because cremation is often shorthand for disappearance. It's something handled by "them" offsite, elsewhere, and I think that's problematical.

It is a sadness and a shame that cremation, the fire in this context, is seen as an industrial process instead of an elemental one, in the way that earth is elemental. I see no difference in the machinery it takes to dig a hole [and] the machinery it takes to build a fire. Humans figured out both before they had backhoes and retorts. But we are much more willing to go stand next to the hole in the ground than we are willing to stand next to the fire. And I think this has to do with our notions about fire itself. We'd be wise, as a culture, to examine some of these things.

Frontline: When families come in and have their loved one cremated, do you talk to them about going with you to the crematorium?

Thomas Lynch: About 40 percent of the dead that we're taking care of are cremated, and every family is asked if they'd like to come with us to the crematory. Some do. Most say, "No, go ahead and take care of that." And that's unfortunate. But more and more, when we say to them, "You may, and maybe you ought ..." or, "Maybe someone in your family should be designated, just to go in as your proxy, to say, 'Everything was done as it should be done,'" they do it.

Frontline: When families have gone to the crematory, has it made a difference?

Thomas Lynch: The crematory we use is impeccably run by ethical people, people we inspect, unannounced, a couple times every year. We make appointments for cremations because we have to go and watch the placement of the body in the retort and the beginning of the process, the identification process that's part of that, and we retrieve the ashes.

But when people go with us, it's at the back end of an industrial park in Lavonia, near a railroad track, so it's unlike the kind of commemorative surroundings that we have in our local cemeteries -- more is the pity. All the same, 100 percent of the people that have gone with us are grateful that we invited them to go. I can only take from that the sense that we're on the right track there.

Frontline: The open casket, it is something that's often mocked.

Thomas Lynch: I've sat with families who said, "Well, we want a closed casket," and I've often asked them, "Well, had they not died yesterday, would you not want to see them today?" The question is not meant to mock; the question is to say: "What is it you don't want to see? It's not that you don't want to see your mother or your father or your sister or your brother. It's not that you don't want to see them dressed up or laid out or with glasses on, or too much makeup or their hair done in a clumsy way. That's not what you don't want to see, because we can fix that all." What we don't want to see is our mother or our father dead, and that is the part we need to see.

Frontline: Does it affect the nature of the grief if someone was present for the dying of the loved one?

Thomas Lynch: What you're looking at [in the case of someone being there during that time] is everything's in order. Everything seems to fall into place. Everything assumes its natural order. So yes, the hurt is there, but the hurt does not overwhelm.

So what you've seen is what I've seen: that people who deal with their dead deal with death better. It's the people who, in many ways, try to put on the smiley face, that brittle grin you see so often that says, "We're going to be happy." It's that white-knuckled, socially enforced celebration [where] oftentimes the dead are absent from it, because that would be too compelling; that would be too much of a challenge.

So yeah, I do find that people who have dealt with their dying -- whether it was taking them to their chemotherapy or sitting those weeks through hospice care, or checking in those weeks through hospice care, because we can't always be physically present -- those people who were thoroughly engaged with this are thoroughly engaged with the rest of it. Does it make it easier? Do they get through it better? I'd have to say yeah, they do. Everything seems to fall into place. And yeah, everything plays its part in that.

Frontline: The custom of eulogy, what is its meaning?

Thomas Lynch: It has to do with the gift of language. It gives us a way to get some little mastery over these uncontrollable things by giving it a narrative thread. And a narrative is nothing other than a journey. ... And Mrs. Verrino's eulogy, her narrative of what she and her husband and their child were going through, was a way of sort of mastering this journey.

Her testimony is like all testimony -- it is a combination of gratitude and grief, and that the gratitude does not trump the grief, nor does the grief undo the gratitude. They can coexist.

The trouble is, in our culture we try to have one or the other -- either/or -- and it's both and then some in real experience.

Frontline: With your own mother and father and their funerals, what were the moments that had meaning for you?

Thomas Lynch: Well, both my parents were buried like Irish Catholics were buried, so there was this sort of tribal and religious language that had been developed over centuries for how we do this. There is a comfort when you don't have to reinvent that wheel, when we know we have to be at church at a certain time and that these prayers will be said and not those, and that this is accustomed behavior and this is outside the pale, and this is where we go.

So we had those advantages. Still, as every grieving person knows, we have to reinvent the wheel in which we are now orphaned. We are now without a mother or without a father. That is a wheel we can only invent at the time it happens. We can't prearrange that. Even though we can plan it and pay for it and all that, we can't really get that wheel to turn for us until it turns itself.

My mother died on the 27th of October and was buried on the 31st of October, so it was the Eve of All Saints. It seemed like an appropriate time for this sainted woman. But I remember coming home after the mass and the burial and the luncheon, getting back to her house -- it was about 3:00-ish in the afternoon -- and thinking, "The trick-or-treaters are coming." I have children at home; my wife had taken them home from the luncheon.

I went back to my father's house, and I remember thinking, "But life goes on." And that is the cruel part, and that is the good news and the bad news all at once -- that things are happening even so. I remember it hitting me there in the house: She actually died; we actually buried her today; she's actually not coming back here; she's actually gone.

And so I think of widowed people who must go through that when they're folding a sweater or cleaning out a drawer or looking for the power drill that their husband used to use to fix this drawer or that one -- these little mundane reminders that life is changed utterly and yet utterly the same.

So we learn to live with it. And I suppose this is the message at every graveside: They stay, we go, until we come to that point in which we are brought there, and we stay and they go.

So yes, I think all of these things help to sort of "fix" us in the firmament of where we are at any given time with our youth and our age, our well-being or our infirmity, our dying, our death and our remembrance. I see it all as part of the one journey, all as part of the one pilgrimage.

Months after my father died, I can remember this wave of feelings that would come over me, catching me at the most unpredictable times, this wallop of him being dead, him being gone. And it was over, oftentimes, the most mundane of circumstances.

Frontline: And you have mentioned the range of feelings and emotions at a funeral. ...

Thomas Lynch: I've always been touched by the fact that there seems to be as much laughter as weeping at the big life events. At weddings people are forever weeping at what is supposed to be a joyous event. We're celebrating love, huh? And yet someone's weeping because of the changed life that we're seeing before us. A daughter is no longer the daughter only or the son no longer the son only. So everything is weakened; weakened and tightened at the same time.

So we weep and we laugh, we laugh and we sing, and we try to work our way around this changed reality in much the same way a death in the family articulates this changed reality. And we laugh sometimes at all those good memories and all those silly things the person said and all those wise things that that person said and all their foibles.

I do find this recent push for every funeral to be a celebration of life as, in a way, a kind of a cruel joke on people who are in acute grief. So I like the word "funeral" for what we're doing here, because it doesn't require me to feel this way or that. It gives me room to do either, all along this sort of emotional register.

Frontline: There's been a sort of national conversation about funerals over the years. What is your sense of what's driven and shaped that conversation, and what, if anything, has been missing from that public view of it all?

Thomas Lynch: I think it's always been the case that funerals in general, and funeral directors in particular, provide an easy target for cartooning, because there is so much about what we do that can be held up for ridicule. It's an easy target; it always is -- you know, the Digger O'Dell [the "friendly undertaker" character in the 1950s television series Life of Riley]. And particularly when you see the transaction which involves this rather impressive life-or-death event with the rather mundane mercantility of it all. There is a fee. We do have a charge for our caskets. Money is involved. So it's easy enough. And I'm, along with the next guy, as interested in those cartoons as everyone else is. But when the entire conversation circles around and around about how much it's going to cost or how can you prevent this charge, I just find it silly after a while.

Whether someone comes into the funeral home insisting on the least expensive or the most expensive, I see in both cases an effort to assign value to cost, and I just think in my own experience it's never had much to do with it. It just doesn't work out that way. People will say, "I'd like something simple and inexpensive," and I want to say, "Well, over here we have simplicity; over here we have cheap." It's not always the same thing, and for everyone it's different.

But maybe with the fact that 75 million baby boomers are working their way up to the bar of mortality now, it's dawning on them that this could happen to them. Maybe because it's happening to their parents or their siblings and some of their friends now, suddenly I see the cultural conversation changing from "how much?" to "how come?"; from "what are we going to buy?" to "what are we going to do?" And I find that latter conversation much more compelling and much more difficult, because it's not as easy as dollars and cents. The till doesn't ring as precisely, and what works and where the values are require more discernment.

So I'm interested in it. I see my sons now working through this, and their generation. And the components of a funeral sometimes change. For some people it's not the open casket and the three-day wake and the roses and the limousines and the Panis Angelicus. For more and more people it's a trip to the crematory and some variation on the wake where people pay different types of witness. So it's interesting times we live in that way.

Frontline: And are you a cremation or a burial man? I know it won't matter, it will be others, but do you see yourself as the fire or the earth, or --?

Thomas Lynch: I've come to admire the earth, the wind and the fire. I really don't care. I've really come to the point where I can see in a fire all that release; I can see the Holy Spirit in it, you know. But I have graves at Oak Grove; I have graves in West Clare [County, Ireland]. I really think my people will know what to do when the time comes, and these are details I won't have to worry about.

Frontline: How different is confronting death without faith?

Thomas Lynch: I think of disbelief as a faith of its own kind. I was watching [author and cultural commentator] Christopher Hitchens the other day. He had a new book out about God not being great. There are days I can get behind that theory and have. But then I can read the work of Barbara Brown Taylor or St. Paul or C.S. Lewis, and I think, how would you get by without it? On any given day, it's up for grabs.

But I don't know of anybody who has come in here entirely angry at the prospect of God who has done well with this type of thing, with deaths in the family.

Frontline: But you've seen people come in that are agnostics or --

Thomas Lynch: But even people who do not believe or claim no religiosity or no particular faith, they are not without some text, some book they regard as, if not holy, it is the handle they're trying to hold onto to get through this.

Frontline: Will you care after your death if they take care of you in death as you did your dad? Will that matter?

Thomas Lynch: Whether or not my family is involved with the care of my body, that's their business. I'll be the dead guy, and the dead say nothing. This is a sign to me that they don't care, that heaven is not having to worry about these things, so I'm determined not to worry about them either.

But, you know, we used to say to my father, who directed a fair few funerals, "What do you want done with you when you're dead?," and he'd say, "Well, you'll know what to do." I think mine will know what to do, too, not because I've said, "Do this or that," but because they have seen life as I have seen it, and they sort of know me and I know them. And so they'll know what to do.

Frontline: And yet you write that beautiful essay Tract in your book, The Undertaking, which is in some way a map, is it?

Thomas Lynch: Well, read it closely, and what I've written is that as long as they deal with it, I don't care what they do. I do not care but that they do it honorably. That they do it for themselves I think is very important. So yeah, I enjoyed writing that piece. And I do think that while the dead don't care, the dead matter. The dead matter to the living. And at least so far as my experience is concerned, the living who bear those burdens honorably are better off for it.

Frontline: Bearing witness one way or another, that's a key ingredient.

Thomas Lynch: Well, it's showing up and just being there is worth an awful lot. There's this wonderful essay that was written -- I have it framed in the hallway there; the woman's name, I think, is Sullivan who wrote it. She talks about how in her life the difference was not between doing good and evil. It was just doing the next right thing.

I needed to read that piece because I'm disinclined -- when someone's sick, when someone's out of sorts, when someone's dead -- I'm disinclined to be around that. I mean, it's uncomfortable, and I don't know what to say any more than the next guy, and I don't do strawberry rhubarb pie. But I find that if you just show up, if you just walk in the door, people think you're a hero. And I have found that, whether I'm walking in the door with a stretcher and one of my own to help carry their dead out, or if I'm going to the hospital to visit a sick relative or friend, or if I show up for a funeral at another place, you know, at a distance, they thank you for that.

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AN INTERVIEW WITH SEAN LYNCH

Original Link

Sean Lynch, 27, is funeral director assistant to his father Thomas Lynch, his brother Michael, and Wes Rice and Ken Kutzli at the Lynch & Sons funeral home in Milford, Mich., where he has worked since 1999. Before coming to this career, he had a background in fine arts and took many courses that helped prepare him for the work he does now preparing the dead for viewing and burial. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Jan. 27, 2007.

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Frontline: Why did you decide on this kind of career?

Sean Lynch: I wanted work that had accountability, not only to family but accountability to myself. I knew that the job was interesting. I knew what my father went through -- the calls that came at odd hours of the night and during holidays and he had to leave abruptly. So I wanted a job that would provide my life with not only some sort of introspection on myself but for others.

Frontline: Growing up, what did you understand your father to do?

Sean Lynch: The way I heard it put is that "Your dad works with dead people." And I always knew it to be quite the opposite to that -- that my dad worked with living people.

Frontline: Can you give a thumbnail sketch of what you do here?

Sean Lynch: I assist in the directing of funerals and coordinating of arrangement conferences. I sit down with families from virtually start to finish and every type of detail or event that you can associate with a funeral. Then I play a large part in the preparation of the deceased for the families that we serve. That's my main focus.

Frontline: And the preparation and the dressing and care of the deceased, why do you like that?

Sean Lynch: I think all of my life I've excelled at noticing certain details. And I suppose in my line of work, I can almost directly affect someone's memory -- a nine-year-old boy walking into a funeral home seeing his grandfather or grandmother look entirely natural, as if they had just left home to visit. For me, those small details add up to what we use in our mind as the thumbprint for the people that we know in our lives.

I also hope that I'm good at correcting those details or bringing those back to those people the wrinkles in someone's hands or face or the beauty mark or the hair that was lost during chemo. You can only go as far as families wish for you to go, but if you're given that permission, I think that there is a lot of good that [can] come from it.

Frontline: Generally, what does caring for the dead mean?

Sean Lynch: The very starting point is, wash someone properly -- maybe they've been in a nursing home for years and years -- and then after washing someone and combing their hair, it's dressing them with whatever is provided or making sure that there's bedding with them. This extends into whether people's choices are burial or cremation.

And you can never overstep the boundaries of what the family wants you to do. You can try to have them get there with you, but a lot of times -- I hate to say it -- there are sometimes families that they may have not seen someone in 50 years, and they don't really care. This is a person that they feel obliged to take care of by the bare essentials but nothing more past that.

Frontline: Is the obligation to do it right to the family, or is the obligation to the dead?

Sean Lynch: It's always some of both, but I have dealt with families before where I did wonder if there was a resentment that was harbored that went so deep that for some reason they could not get past that. There are families that seem disinterested, while there are other families who I find amazing at the things that they put together or the participation to the end, of where they'll go with us. Many of my friends who I've grown up with here always had good character, but now I've been reassured of that in the wake of their dad's or mother's passing by what they do as sons or daughters in dealing with deaths in their family.

Frontline: In the prep room, where you take care of the body, how does that work?

Sean Lynch: It all depends on the person, the age, the nature of someone's death, how they were when they were alive. Smokers don't always have the best coloration in their skin, and drinkers go through a lot. We all go through our own deterioration while we're alive, just because we get older.

A lot of it has to do with properly washing someone's face, probably better than they've ever done in their life.

Then, starting with colors and everything -- say someone was from my Irish descent. They're pale-complected and have varying traits on their skin -- freckles, red marks, different veins that produce different colorations -- so therefore they shouldn't turn out looking even. I think there's a lot of character traits that should be left, that shouldn't be covered.

We've all seen people at hospitals, family members, that have had a greenish or yellow tinge to their skin. That's where cross-complementing comes at hand. But it should be fitting for the person, and it just requires looking at the person and trying to get an idea from the pictures that families give us.

Frontline: You've said that what goes on in the prep room is sacred. What does that mean?

Sean Lynch: We conduct ourselves differently in different rooms throughout life, but [in] that room, you truly do.

Frontline: And it's quiet. No radio in the prep room.

Sean Lynch: It is a very sacred area. It's a medium point between hospitals or homes or medical examiners -- a medium point before we go to this next step, because no matter what is your faith -- this goes out there on a limb -- no matter what stillness I'm feeling at 8:00 a.m. in the morning, if I am in there alone, I feel a little bit better if I'm conducting myself the way I would want someone to conduct themselves in the presence of a deceased family member of mine.

A lot of what I said may give people the impression that there's this nothingness about the room. But I say a lot of the time that, when I die, I'm probably not going to be hanging out at a funeral home -- I can think of a million other places [my spirit would] rather venture off to, if there is such a thing as a traveling spirit.

But for the ones maybe that are unsettled or lingering or maybe need to leave a lasting message for someone or for whatever reasons that they do kind of stay in between, before they make their way to the heavens or the hells or whatever your beliefs are, I want to be in a behavior and in an attitude -- a minister here always says, "Be in an attitude of prayer as we pray this prayer." And I like that, kind of an attitude of being open to this. You know, you may be alone or you may not be. Always be open for that.

Frontline: Are people often uneasy about seeing their loved ones at the funeral home, the visitation?

Sean Lynch: It would be bad to answer this question without adding, "Everyone's different, of course." When I sit down with people, I just try to talk with them as if I was trying to get an understanding of something, too.

You have to first realize what someone's discomforts might be. Why might they be uncomfortable? A lot of times what we ask is: "Are there things at funerals that you had seen that you didn't care for, that seemed inappropriate or that were just plain bizarre? Were there things that seemed very fitting to the person or to the family, or meaningful, sacred?" And when you can separate between those things, you get an idea of not only the people that you're communicating with, but the person that you're burning or burying, and what's to be done.

I do sit down with people that have a wide range, as I do, of different feelings about different issues relative to funeral service. And I realize there isn't a rehearsal for this, and that people will kind of fire out with things because they are emotional, because they are kind of testing. Then multiply that by all the different dynamics of our relationships with maybe estranged brothers or sisters, and the divorce of parents.

Frontline: You're in the presence of death always. What is that for you?

Sean Lynch: I think, in the face of having an occupation that deals with death day in and day out, that you constantly have to look for those opportunities not only to excel in your work but to somehow improve upon the situation.

I've often made the point that we're good at what we do not because we're callous, but I do have to distinguish myself from being a mourner and actually rise to be the funeral director, because I'm no good to the people that have employed me if I'm another mourner.

There are a lot of people probably that go into this business for perhaps the wrong reasons; they view themselves as co-grievers with people and that families are looking for people who understand always what's going on. I find that most families are OK that you don't understand; that you, even as a funeral director, don't have the slickest way of offering your sympathies; that 99 percent of the time there aren't words for what happens.

I've always heard people say, "I couldn't do what you do." I truly think that there isn't anyone on this earth that couldn't do what we do. I think it is within all of us to know exactly what to do when we're in the presence of death. I think we all know exactly what to do.

Frontline: What are those things we all know what to do?

Sean Lynch: Have a good cry. There's a reason that we have that reflex. But that's where you see a lot of this confusion, because we've become a species that in some way it's become indecent to cry, and somehow, for the widow at her husband's casket, it's not appropriate for her to fall to her knees and crumble in the presence of her employer or her accountant or her friend or grandmother. I say, what better people to fall before in front of that casket? I mean, those are the people that are supposed to catch you.

These strange standards that we've put together surrounding funerals, if we were able to just do away with those for a couple of days, we would really get to the core of a lot of good, pure, human emotion. And those close neighbors -- love and pain and hurt, all of those things -- truly you do start realizing how they are reciprocals of each other. You cannot have one without the other.

Frontline: There is something primal, something universal in the sound of grief.

Sean Lynch: It's the language that has no barriers, it really is. You know what the sound of it is. It's unmistakable. And I won't lie: I'm uncomfortable a lot of the time, but there's a reason for that, too. There's a reason people feel uncomfortable around it.

Frontline: What is it?

Sean Lynch: I think it is because you truly realize that this is a part of life that you are powerless over; that you do not have the end-all, be-all greatest thing to say that's going to make it better. It humbles.

And to think that somehow getting the obituary right or the printing right, that that's going to level off with that reality, is just ridiculous. Those things combined all together are simply just to make the experience of walking through the door bearable.

So when people become very complimentary that the memorial video presentation was so good, I appreciate hearing that, but what means more to me is if I was able to walk a family in, and they were truly able to get to that point where they felt comfortable enough to let it go, that head-on collision of "This is what's happened."

In a sense, we're all orphans at some point in our life. And it hurts really, really bad.

Frontline: In preparing a body, you're giving them back to ready them to let go.

Sean Lynch: A lot of times I think we've confused as a culture that somehow being present among the dying somehow means we're accepting of death. I think you can narrow down to a very moment when you're left with those feelings of acceptance.

However, maybe your reaction isn't as instantaneous as the death itself. [And when that reaction comes], that's truly when you measure your acceptance of the death, your understanding of it, your not understanding it.

So by preparing the deceased for services or visitations when there isn't that convenient time for people to have assembled at the deathbed of someone, you are in a sense -- as Father Leo [Lulko] of the Church of the Holy Spirit says -- "gift-wrapping" them for that next step.

Frontline: There seems a huge misconception about the funeral rite of preparing the body.

Sean Lynch: Yeah. There is the "shell" theory [in referring to the body], and I understand what people are trying to say, and I understand how that can be a comfort. But that's maybe the talk that we should avoid if we do want to get to those core emotions and those "chance-of-a-lifetime" feelings.

Frontline: Can you talk about the shell theory, that the body is a shell?

Sean Lynch: If I'm the close family friend, and I don't know how just to stand silent and be a support without saying anything, because I'm truly feeling uncomfortable -- so the best I can offer up is something that I've heard: "This is just his shell." I hear that, and I have to bite my tongue, because everything that makes this person visually who they are, and that we can identify up here with who they are, is evident right there, or hopefully evident if we've done our job right. We do not deal with the idea of someone.

When I picture my sister [Heather Lynch], with all of her talents and beauties and everything, I do not picture her as this wavering gas or a sort of amoebic force or something. I picture her as the attractive, somewhat-shorter-than-I-am, brunette, feisty Irishwoman who has a big heart and would do anything for any culture of people in the world. I have to picture her in my head, starting with that short brunette young lady, because that's my sister. All the rest comes after that.

Frontline: Many find the viewing the body vulgar.

Sean Lynch: Oh, I've heard that. "Barbaric" is the word sometimes, I think.

Frontline: Regarding seeing our dead, what do you recommend to families who aren't sure about doing that?

Sean Lynch: For a family who is undecided and seems open to the idea, I think that you have to use other people and our own experiences as being a kind of testimony to the value in it, because -- this is not my line; it's been said before -- "We deal with death by dealing with our dead."

Frontline: What about the discussions with a family about having a visitation, viewing the loved one in other ways?

Sean Lynch: The way I explain it to families is that what we do, and the timing of things, is entirely up to you. So if I understand a family is not open or does not need to see somebody, first I have to get an understanding: Are they not open to being here for the grueling process of standing on their feet, receiving friends? Because ask anyone, and you won't get too many hands raised about that.

Are they open to seeing their father or mother or other family member in their casuals, at an hour of the night undisclosed publicly -- just them? They can say a family prayer or exchange stories privately behind closed doors. Is that something they might be interested [in]?

So is it the situation? Is it the tradition? Is it the event altogether that they're opposed to? Or is it something else? Are they prevented by the nature of someone's death? Are we not able to see this person? Would it not be beneficial to see this person? Would we be able to take anything from identifying our dead loved ones?

There are circumstances where I personally have had to tell families that "If I saw some type of value in you seeing your son, I would recommend you seeing him. I do not. There is nothing there that resembles your son." And I've had to have that discussion with fathers and mothers. But once again, to let them know that they should view it as something that they have complete control over, the time and the nature of it and the informality or formality of it -- however it takes place, it is important to get them to that point.

Frontline: What difference does it make to them if they do decide to view the body?

Sean Lynch: I've never sat down with a family that came back to me and wrote me a card or something and said, "I regretted seeing so-and-so." Never, ever have I had that.

I have had families that still, if the nature of someone's death had altered their appearance greatly and the work that we did was good work but still didn't all add up together, I've had families that they've turned around and said that they just really don't look like themselves. "Thank you, but could we close the casket?" I've had families that have said that many times. And still I think it is important for them to be able to be there and come to make that decision for themselves.

Frontline: This business has its own inherent contradictions, and it is a business. You have a tension, always, between both worlds.

Sean Lynch: For us it's a business that is dependent on reputation and morality, care and consolation. Those things will determine how many families trust us. I've had to tell families before going into the selection room, when they were very vocal about how they thought I wanted them to purchase a particular casket, I've had to say bluntly, "I don't care what casket." It's their decision to make that decision. We've had woodworkers say, "I'm going to build my own casket, Tom; you won't have to sell me an expensive one," and all my dad says is, "Have it delivered here."

The focal points have never been merchandise. You look through the trade magazines and everything like that, you might get a different story. But very much within my family, the Lynches, and families that we've worked with, what families do together is our greatest interest, because we never want the nature of the services to always be dependent on expenses.

Now, that's not to say that if expenses for a family are of a great concern that they should be looking at huge sprays of multicolored roses and things. There's a practicality within it. But we also have to be kind of a help to them to keep things in a range, too.

Frontline: Do you see any connection between what you do and what hospice does?

Sean Lynch: Oh, sure. The intimate natures of it are very similar. I had a conversation with a woman who works for hospice the other day, and we both were agreeing about the impossibility not to feel a connection to the people that you're serving, whether it's the dying or the surviving. And to avoid those connections are, once again, missed opportunities.

Frontline: What is your view of what some would call the inherent contradiction of spending so much time making someone who's dead appear live or lifelike?

Sean Lynch: I think that no matter what size paintbrush you use, it's impossible to erase death's aftereffects. The sheer motionlessness of someone -- eyes closed, mouth closed, you know, no matter what pleasant expression someone has, the stillness about the room, the flat pulse -- you can feel that. Stand alone at someone's casket with no other support in the room and I think people may feel a presence, but I think that you can truly hear the hush in the room. And I think that that's a good sort of brush with death.

So we are not [as] concerned with making someone appear alive as we are trying to keep someone natural-looking. And I like getting to that point, because, quite frankly, if that person can feel, by identifying visually, that this is in fact my mom and she is dead, and I'm not so fixated on that random run of eyeliner across her eye or something, if I'm not faced with that, I can truly start to accept maybe that my mother is dead, that my brother will no longer be here with us, that my sister-in-law will not smile here on this earth in front of me physically anymore.

Frontline: Can you briefly take me through, when you're in that prep room, the actual steps of preparing a body?

Sean Lynch: First, before someone's embalming takes place, a lot of times people put a type of moisturizing cream on their face, and then we will thoroughly wash them, shampoo and condition their hair, things like that.

After that, there is the embalming, in which the simple injection would take place.

After that process of injecting embalming fluid and setting features and properly aspirating someone and removing the gases takes place, a lot of times what I like to do is to go back and to reset someone's features, because a lot of times our muscles will recoil back into their normal positions.

Frontline: Can you talk about what happens as a result of embalming?

Sean Lynch: After someone is embalmed, the first things I try to see are what sort of positive things have happened. A lot of times someone's coloration has changed to a more a normal pigment and tone. A lot of times there's the filling out of their tissues and things of that nature. And I'm trying to see, within that range, what I can do constructively or cosmetically that will work with those, always using a photograph or, if I know the person, my memory to serve me through that process.

But the very finer points, setting someone's features and making sure their eyes and their mouth [are] closed properly and -- a lot of times there's such an emphasis on the pleasant expression on someone's face, and I think that there are some people that went through life with a frown or a smirk, something different from a smile. So to always have this jolly smile on someone's face I think is maybe a little bit idealistic on behalf of the funeral director. But once again, if you can be sensitive to the natural kind of movement or muscle fluctuation of someone's facial features, you can achieve that. There are thousands of different variances in a smile or someone's smirk. It is amazing to me. It is in that slightest shift in someone's upper lip or the dimple, you know? It is almost better to leave some of those natural markings in that someone has had for months, years. The family is obviously OK with those. Why cover those?

Frontline: When you put that person in the casket, what do you next do?

Sean Lynch: After someone is placed in the casket, there's the straightening of the surrounding fabric in the casket. A lot of times for men you'd have to pull a suit coat downward; you have a lot of bunching-up fabric. For women, organizing the fabric on their dress and things. And there is the need to make sure of the natural bends of their body, for as we get older we tend to hunch over a little bit more. And some people, as they get into their late 70s or 80s, they actually almost shrink because of their spinal columns.

And I use "fabric" as a very generic term for the casket. The casket is simply another sort of bed that you're laying someone to rest in. It's the way I look at it. It's why we also often explain to family members who might say, "Well, we're planning cremation; it's just a waste of a casket," I often reply that the casket, just as when we plan to bury someone, serves its purpose for that time, and that the reason we don't get into renting caskets is because that preparation, that time placing someone in their casket, seeing to those details, caring for someone in that preparation room, is an extension of that ceremony.

We have had families that wanted to be involved in dressing their deceased loved ones. I think that if most people took the time, they would realize that it probably does share more of a relationship with putting our family members to bed than it does as a display model, you know.

Frontline: Give me a sense of how much time it takes to do those steps in the prep room. ...

Sean Lynch: I would say from start to finish, the process of being embalmed would be two hours. That could be short or long depending on the circumstances or someone's weight or size.

But the process of dressing them properly and casketing them, of doing their cosmetics, once again depending greatly on the nature of someone's death, I would say it can be an hour and a half to two, sometimes three hours.

Frontline: How many people have you advised on not seeing their loved ones?

Sean Lynch: There was one father I had to have a discussion with where I recommended not seeing his son. I knew this family and went to school with their son. I remember he still wanted to see his son, and the best I could say to him was: "Please listen. Please listen to me. Continue talking to me, and if after what I say you still want to see your son, I'll stand there with you." So one time only this happened in almost eight years that I've been here working in the capacity I do now.

Frontline: And what did you and your brother decide about planning for that day that will one day come, when your own dad dies?

Sean Lynch: My dad is a Catholic man. He very much wants a funeral mass. And to us in passing, he's described it, he doesn't want a collection of speakers to get up and share the highlights of his life. He wants the prayers, the incense, the burning candles, the gifts, the mourning, the laughing, the whole bundle of it. And I think he truly realizes that, although he's been involved in choreographing the good funeral, sometimes that this one is truly left up in the air and that maybe his kids will have to create his good funeral. And I think -- I know -- it will be a good funeral

Frontline: Can you be ready for that?

Sean Lynch: You can't. So much of our culture emphasizes this sort of preplanning as a response to something. The only bet I'm comfortable making is that I will cry, I will laugh, and it will be a very, very sad day, not only for our family but for Milford and friends scattered about at large. And I'm hoping that I don't know what to do. I'm hoping that the support of other family members and other funeral directors, they'll be able to kind of steer me in the right direction and get me there.

Frontline: Can you imagine preparing your dad in death?

Sean Lynch: I can't. Once again, we're talking about death, people dying. So many times we get sidetracked by the stuff involved that we truly forget that someone's dead and that it stings bad. And when that sting is covered up, I think we lose potentially the most important player to the funeral: the hurt involved. I don't know the exact name of the poem, but the poem is simply "Catherine, We Die." And I love it so much. And so often we get off of that very short statement: We do die.

Frontline: And your own death?

Sean Lynch: It's going to happen. But I do know that now I have a file in the prearrangements, and it says that the upper chapel here, which is a little bit smaller in size than the lower chapel. I like it. I like the way that room feels in there, and I could picture me being in there. I don't really have a preference as far as the casket. I don't really see it as being my decision. I don't want to say, "Use the cheapest," nor do I want to say, "Use the most expensive." I simply want to say to people, "Use what you'll feel right using, and the other things will fall into place." I mean, the people that care about me will know what to do.

Frontline: Burial for sure, no cremation?

Sean Lynch: I don't have a preference. I mean, I'm kind of a bones-and-nails kind of guy -- [singer] Tom Waits, you know. I always like how he describes cemeteries and things. So I guess I've always pictured a good old-fashioned tombstone, limestone or sandstone or something that will teeter in the weather. I've always liked that visual image. But if my family wanted to have me cremated, I'm sure I'd find peace in the fire, too.

Frontline: And are you scared? You face death every day.

Sean Lynch: Growing up in the face of funerals seven days a week, or funeral-related activities, you truly think about it more, and I don't think it makes us any more accepting or comfortable with the idea of it.

Frontline: What do you think are the challenges ahead for funeral firms in terms of your generation?

Sean Lynch: I think that they'll be more inclined to be directly involved, and they'll be better educated hopefully. We try to educate all the people that come through here about what is fact and what is fiction: that they can go to the crematory with us; that they can, in fact, be involved in every aspect of someone's funeral service. Knowing those things in advance and hopefully, given more time, our generation will have grown older and be more equipped to know exactly to what end they can go the distance with our dead.

The most important thing I see is not the punctuation or the ending to this; it's that what we do in observance of this, the process as we go through it, I think we have a good opportunity to find more meaning out of life if we did become better participants in death.

And may I mention to you here something concerning a family we served -- the parents of Anthony John Verrino, Nevada and Anthony?

I will say that the most memorable thing that I had taken from the funeral for their son related very little to the funeral service or me going to the home during the removal and having them walk out with baby Anthony and help us into the car with him and just the care and the bravery of that family.

What I'll be left with is at 8:30 a.m. on the coldest day in Michigan this year, I ran into his parents at a coffee shop. I was just heading to work, and they were bundled up in the appropriate gear for the weather. They had a backpack, and in the backpack was the temporary headstone that we had helped order for the grave of their son who was just buried two days before. Coldest day of the year in Michigan, and they were walking up to get a cup of coffee before going to place, just in their own company, their son's headstone at the cemetery.

And I remember this kind of glow that they had in their eyes, and I remember thinking, "That's participating." And even though this was a temporary grave marker, if there's any sort of ending point to this, it was this young couple, together, just the two of them, on the coldest day you can imagine, walking a mile or two up to the local cemetery and seeing this through. And although all of the events put together to that point made for such a courageous and beautiful tribute to their son, I couldn't think of a better ending than that.

And they did it all the way through.

Every step of the way. That somehow they could find this means, I think, that it is within us to be able to, too, to go there and be able to do those things.

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