The Depositions

by Thomas Lynch

  Which is all I ever wanted out of love and husbanding, family and parenting—to be fondly regarded by the ones I loved; to be known for how I came home at night, minded the borders, kept an eye out for impending dangers, paid the piper, did my job, loved them all fiercely to the end. It was the dream I inherited from my mother and father for whom a division of labor did not mean a disproportion of power.

  I WAS, IN those times, a casualty of the gender wars waged by the men and women of my generation over duties and identities. It was, I suppose, a necessary battle, which we did not choose and were powerless to avoid—damned if we did and if we didn’t fight. We all took too seriously the carping and dyspepsia of a generation for whom sexism was a sin only men could commit, and only and always against women. Power and money were zero-sum games. Sex and love were often trophies. Women of the day kept their litany of injustices—the glass ceilings, the hostile work environments, the sixty-three-cents-on-the-dollar deal, the who-does-the-most-work-in-the-house debate. The little tally of inconsistencies I maintained kept driving me crazier and crazier. That the courts gave reproductive options to women but not to men was a bother. There was no clinic to which men could repair to terminate their impending paternity. If “choice” were such a fine thing, it occurred to me, oughtn’t one and all, not one and half of the population have it? That my daughter might “choose” a career in the military but only my sons had to register for the draft struck me as odd. No less the victim-chic status of the feminist intelligent­sia who were always ranting about “women and other minorities” while quietly ignoring the fact that women had been the majority for years. The planet was fifty-two percent female. That women not only out-numbered men, they outlived them—by years, not months, in every culture—seemed a thing that ought to be, at least, looked into. Never mind the incessant sloganeering, or the militia of women who blamed Ted Hughes for Sylvia Plath’s suicide or who blamed their husbands for the history of the world or who turned men into the tackling dummies for their chronic discontents. Maybe it was all that “every intercourse is an act of rape” hysteria, or “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” or the way they joked about the man who had his penis cut off by his angry wife. I used to wonder what late-night talk-show host would survive any less-than-reverential comment about a woman’s genitalia if the damage had been reversed.

  Violence against women was quite rightly abhorred whilst violence against men was generally ignored. Nothing in the literature rang more true to me than something I had overheard in a conversation between pathologists who were autopsying a fatal domestic case: “A man will kill his wife, then kill himself,” one said grimly; “a woman kills her husband, then does her nails.” Whatever else I did not “get,” I got that one loud and clear: the higher ground of entitlement that victims, self-proclaimed, could occupy. I’m certain there were additional grievances, like so much else, I’ve forgotten now.

  In ways that were not so for my parents’ generation and, please God, will not be so for my sons’ and daughter’s, the men and women of my generation suffered a kind of disconnect that left them each wary of the other’s intentions, each ignorant of the other’s changing, each speaking a dialect the other could not cipher, each wondering why the other just didn’t get it. Such are the accidents of history and hers—that we make aliens of our intimates, enemies of friends, strange bedfellows entirely that crave the common ground but rarely really find it.

  So it is with nations and neighbors, parents and children, brothers and sisters, family and friends—the list we keep of grievances keeps us perpetually at odds with each other, alone in a world that is growing smaller, more distant from each other, more estranged.

  The sisters, Godhelpus, are praying for peace and reconciliation and forgiveness. They are praying to be vessels of God’s love and mercy. They say it will take a miracle and that the world changes one heart at a time. They have unleashed the hounds of their Hibernian faith—the rubrics of which involve candles, moonlight, chrisms, icons, incense and every manner of mystic unguents, passions, immersions, aromatics, and possibly herbs, the recipes for which were no doubt published in the Gnostic Gospels, found in those jars.

  I STILL DON’T get it. And I’ve quit trying to. Years of living with and among women have convinced me I’m as well off with no dog in that fight. My daughter, my sisters, my beloved wife (in the associative, not possessive sense), and no few women that I count as lifelong friends, the memory of my mother, aunts, and grandmothers—they’ve all been and remain powerful and courageous and selfless humans, gifted with a dignity and calm that has made me wish I knew them better and all the more wary of their mysterious medicines. Most days I recite a litany of gratitudes for the pleasures of their company, the beauty and beatitudes of their intellections. I’m resolved to say nice things about their dogs. It keeps me, so far, safe from the hounds.

  Young neighbor couples and their designer dogs go walking with leashes now on weekend mornings. Their puppies and their babies are all pedigreed. Everyone is better trained and behaved. At every corner there are dangers and warnings; at every intersection, flashing lights and signs. The lesson, of course, is to mind the traffic. They learn to speak and heel and fetch and to return. The men, as is their custom, bark out wisdoms. They pose and sniff, they howl and growl and whine. Their wives and pets grow weary of listening. Some things only the dogs hear, some the women.

  I ORDERED A mum plant for Baxter’s obsequies scheduled for later this month at Mullett Lake. I asked the florist to write, “Sorry,” on the card.

  I hope they get it.

  from

  THE GOOD FUNERAL

  Death, Grief, and the Community of Care

  HOW WE COME TO BE THE ONES WE ARE

  In the summer of 2012, Gus Nichols, one of Dublin’s great undertakers and the President of FIAT-IFTA, the International Federation of Thanatologists Associations, invited me to Ireland to speak on a subject of my choosing. FIAT-IFTA is a congress of funeral directors from around the world and at this, their twelfth international convention, there would be representatives from thirty nations, two hundred and fifty registrants in all, from places as far-flung as Malaysia and Sierra Leone, Argentina and Australia, Canada and China and Columbia. My brother Patrick was the immediate past president of our National Funeral Directors Association and traveled with me as a delegate from the United States to thank Gus, Finbarr O’Connor and, indeed, several members of the Irish Association of Funeral Directors for having traveled to Chicago the year before to participate in Pat’s convention. There would be a gala banquet and golf outing, tours of Glasnevin Cemetery and the Titanic Exhibition in Belfast, and plenty of good shopping in Grafton Street. The conference was held in Dublin Castle, a huge, walled compound in the center of that ancient city, with turrets and towers, dungeons and courtyards, dating to early in the thirteenth century—eight hundred years of history oozing from its stones. And I found myself constructing a line for the obituary I am always editing in my head that would someday in the long-distant future read, “He had presented to funeral directors from around the world.” Travel and castles will do that to you. I was grateful for the invitation.

  I had been to the castle once before. Indeed, I’d been to Ireland dozens of times in the forty-some years since my first visit there in the winter of 1970, in search of my roots and my future, as twentysomethings are wont to do. But my first visit to Dublin Castle was in the late 1980s, to the offices of Poetry Ireland, which were housed there in Bermingham Tower, to arrange for a reading tour of the country after my first book of poems was published.

  And now, twenty-five years and several books later, rising to speak about our common calling to a room full of mortuary sorts from Asia and Africa and the Americas, from Europe and the Antipodes and just down the road, it seemed as if my life’s works and preoccupations—poetry and funerals, the literary and the mortuary arts—were finally melding into one. They were, in many ways, the same but different: equal tributaries
of the one enterprise. So much so, in fact, that I had titled my presentation after a poem I intended to read them called “Local Heroes.” How many funeral directors from small-town, middle America, I asked myself, get to hold forth their ideas and recite their poems to colleagues from around the world in Dublin Castle in the middle of June? It felt like a gift and I felt lucky and exceptionally fortunate and it made me wonder, as Gus Nichols was giving me a generous introduction and I was gathering my papers and thoughts together and readying to rise to the august occasion, and praying, as we do, not to make the huge fool of myself that I have in me to do, I wondered what exactly am I doing here?

  How do we come to be the ones we are?

  I was raised by Irish Catholics. Even as I write that it sounds a little like “wolves” or some especially feral class of creature. Not in the apish, nativist sense of immigrant hordes, rather in the fierce faith and family loyalties, the pack dynamics of their clannishness, their vigilance and pride. My parents were grandchildren of immigrants who had mostly married within their tribe. They’d sailed from nineteenth-century poverty into the prospects of North America, from West Clare and Tipperary, Sligo and Kilkenny, to Montreal and Ontario, upper and lower Michigan. Graces and O’Haras, Ryans and Lynchs—they brought their version of the “one true faith,” druidic and priest-ridden, punctilious and full of superstitions, from the boggy parishes of their ancients to the fertile expanse of middle America. These were people who saw statues move, truths about the weather in the way a cat warmed to the fire, omens about coming contentions in a pair of shoes left up on a table, bad luck in some numbers, good fortune in others. Odd lights in the nightscape foreshadowed death; dogs’ eyes attracted lightning; the curse of an old woman could lay one low. The clergy were to be “given what’s going to them,” but otherwise, “not to be tampered with.” Priests were feared and their favor curried—their curses and blessings opposing poles of the powerful medicine they were known to possess. Everything had meaning beyond the obvious. The dead were everywhere and their ghosts inhabited the air and memory and their old haunts, real as ever, if in an only slightly former tense, in constant need of care and appeasement. They were, like the saints they’d been named for, prayed over, prayed to, invoked as protection against all enemies, their names recycled through generations, reassigned to new incarnations.

  My mother thought I might become a priest. Not because I was especially holy; rather, as a devout and Catholic mother of six sons and three daughters, she would’ve known the expected ecclesiastical surtax on so many healthy babies would be a curate or two and maybe a nun to boot. “Be stingy with the Lord and the Lord will be stingy with you,” was the favorite wisdom of her parish priest and confessor, Father Thomas Kenny, of the Galway Kennys in Threadneedle Road.

  I WAS NAMED for a dead priest, my father’s uncle. Some few years after surviving the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, he got “the call.” “Vocations follow famine,” an old bromide holds. No less the flu? He went to seminary in Detroit and Denver and was ordained in the middle of the Great Depression. We have a photo of his First Solemn High Mass on June 10, 1934, at St. John’s Church in Jackson, Michigan, a block from the clapboard house he’d grown up in.

  His father, my great-grandfather, another Thomas Lynch, did not live to get into this photo of women in print dresses and men in straw boaters on a sunny June Sunday between world wars. My great-grandfather had come from the poor townland of Moveen on the West Clare peninsula that forms the upper lip of the gaping mouth of the river Shannon—a treeless sloping plain between the ocean and the estuary, its plots of pasturage divided by hedgerows and intermarriages. He’d come to Michigan for the work available at the huge penitentiary there in Jackson where he painted cellblocks, worked in the laundry, and finished his career as a uniformed guard. He married Ellen Ryan, herself an immigrant. Together they raised a daughter who taught, a son who got good work with the post office, and another who would become a priest—like hitting the trifecta for poor Irish “Yanks,” all cushy jobs with reliable pensions. He never saw Ireland again.

  In the middle of the retinue of family and parishioners posed for the photo at the doors to the church around their freshly minted, homegrown priest, is my father, Edward, aged ten years, seated next to his father and mother, bored but obedient in his new knee breeches. Because the young priest—he has just gone thirty—is sickly but willing, the bishop in Detroit will send him back out West to the bishop in Santa Fe, who will assign him to the parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Taos, in hopes that the high, dry air of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains might ease his upper respiratory ailments and lengthen his days.

  The young curate is going to die of pneumonia just two years later at the end of July, 1936. The Apache women whose babies he baptized, whose sons he taught to play baseball, whose husbands he preached to, will process his rough-sawn coffin down the mountains from Taos, along the upper reaches of the Rio Grande, through landscapes Georgia O’Keeffe will make famous, to the Cathedral in Santa Fe where Archbishop Rudolph Gerken will preside over his requiems, then send his body back to his people, C.O.D., on a train bound for Michigan and other points east.

  A moment that will shape our family destiny for generations occurs a few days later in the Desnoyer Funeral Home in Jackson. The dead priest’s brother, my grandfather, is meeting with the undertaker to sort details for the hometown funeral at St. John’s. He brings along my father, now twelve years old, for reasons we can never know. While the two elder men are discussing plots and boxes, pallbearers and honoraria, the boy wanders through the old mortuary until he comes to the doorway of a room where he espies two men in shirtsleeves dressing a corpse in liturgical vestments. He stands and watches quietly. Then they carefully lift the freshly vested body of his dead uncle from the white porcelain table into a coffin. They turn to see the boy at the door. Ever after my father will describe this moment—this elevation, this slow, almost ritual hefting of the body—as the one to which he will always trace his intention to become a funeral director. Perhaps it aligned in his imagination with that moment during the masses he attended at St. Francis De Sales when the priest would elevate the host and chalice, the putative body and blood of Christ, when bells were rung, heads bowed, breasts beaten in awe? Might he have conflated the corruptible and the incorruptible? The mortal and immortality? The sacred and the profane? We have no way to know.

  “Why,” we would often ask him, “why didn’t you decide to become a priest?”

  “Well,” he would tell us, matter-of-factly, “the priest was dead.”

  It was also true that he’d met Rosemary O’Hara that year, a redheaded fifth-grader who would become the girl of his dreams and who would write him daily when he went off to war with the Marines in the South Pacific; who would marry him when he came home and mother their nine children and beside whom he’d be buried half a century later.

  “God works in strange ways,” my mother would remind us, smiling, passing the spuds, all of us marveling at the ways of things.

  And so these “callings,” such as they were, these summons to her life as a wife and mother and his to a life as a father and undertaker—a life’s work he would always describe as “serving the living by caring for the dead,” or “a corporal work of mercy,” or “not just a living, but a way of life.” And his sons and daughters and their sons and daughters, who now operate half a dozen funeral homes in towns all over lower Michigan, were all called to a life of undertaking. And all are tied to that first week of August, 1936 when a boy watched two men lift the body of a dead priest into a box.

  How we come to be the ones we are seems a useful study and lifelong query. Knowing how we got to where we are provides some clues to the perpetual wonder over what it is we are doing here—a question that comes to most of us on a regular basis. Indeed, a curiosity about one’s place and purpose keeps one, speaking now from my own experience, from going too far astray.

  “Listen to your life,” the writer and ministe
r Frederick Buechner tells us. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.”1

  Thus a book that endeavors to say what I’ve learned from forty years as a funeral director might well be improved by some notes on how I came to be one.

  “In the boredom and pain of it,” Buechner continues, “no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”2

  All these years later it feels like grace—life itself—chancy as any happenstance, and yet we get these glimpses of a plan and purpose behind how we come to be the ones we are.

  POSSIBLY MY FATHER was trying to replicate that moment from his boyhood for me in mine when he took me to work with him one Saturday morning when I was eight or ten.

  The old funeral home in Highland Park was a storefront chapel on Woodward Avenue that served mostly a Romanian clientele because the owner, William Vasu, was part of that immigrant community. There was an apartment upstairs, offices that flanked the parlors, caskets in the basement, and, at the rear of the building, the embalming room. I’ve written elsewhere of this occasion—my first sighting of a dead human—how what I saw raised curiosities about the dead man in particular, adverbial sense, and how my father’s presence and steady answers, his willingness to share his own bewilderments around mortality were sufficient to me on the day. I have written that the presence of the dead human body, first encountered that Saturday morning in my boyhood, changed the gravity in the room, and still changes it today, well into my anecdotage; when one shares a room with a corpse, whether outstretched on a table, laid out on a bed or in a box, the ontological stakes are always raised, the existential ante upped, and the press of our impermanence, our mortality, flexes its terrible gravity in every aspect of our being. Possibly this is why a funeral, the ritual by which we get the dead buried or burned or cast into some particular abyss, seems a weightier enterprise than the ubiquitous celebration of life from which something essential always seems to be missing.