Articles & Columns 2 - Thomas Lynch

Mourning in America

Review By THOMAS LYNCH Sex and the dead, William Butler Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear nearly 80 years ago, are the only two topics that “can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind.” Sandra M. Gilbert got close to the first topic more than 25 years ago in her groundbreaking study…

Going the Distance with Katrina’s Dead

Poet and funeral director Thomas Lynch has been thinking a lot these past couple of weeks about New Orleans and how the dead are precious to those who survive them. “Wherever our spirits go or don’t, ours is a species that has learned to deal with death — the idea of the thing — by…

Left Behind

Like President Bush, I enjoy clearing brush in August. We both like quittance of the suit and tie, freedom from duty and detail and to breathe deeply the insouciant air of summer. He makes for his ranch in Crawford, Tex., a town with no bars and five churches. I come to my holdings near Carrigaholt,…

Our Near-Death Experience

Moveen, Ireland — IMAGES of the papal wake dominated the news this week: the dead man’s body vested, mitered, laid out among his people in St. Peter’s Square, blessed with water and incense, borne from one station to the next in a final journey. Such images – along with the idea that millions of people…

Passed on: Vocation and the family business

The photo of the new priest among his people is an old one. “‘First Solemn High Mass,” it reads in white handprint in the top right corner, “of Rev. Thomas P. Lynch ” and on the next line “St. John’s Church, Jackson, Mich., June 10, 1934.” It is a panoramic, 17″x 7″ black-and-white glossy. Up…

Good grief: an undertaker’s reflections

It’s sunny and 70 at Chapel Hill. I’m speaking to Project Compassion, an advocacy group for end-of-life issues, on an unlikely trinity of oxymorons–the good death, good grief and the good funeral. “What,” most people reasonably ask, “can ever be good about death or grief or funerals?” The 150 people in this room understand. They…

The dead and gone – Rituals of mourning

Not only did they die, they disappeared. There’s the terrible fact becoming all too clear. We will not get them back to let them go again, to wake and weep over them, to look upon their ordinary loveliness once more, to focus all uncertainties on the awful certainty of a body in a box in…

A Serious Undertaking

Like David Fisher in the award-winning HBO series Six Feet Under, when my father died, I embalmed him. My brother Pat assisted. We dressed him, put him in a box and soon thereafter buried him. Tim did the obits and drove the hearse. Eddie called the priest and did the printing. Mary handled the florals…

Witness and remember – McVeigh’s execution should be televised

After 30 years of directing funerals, I’ve come to believe in open caskets. A service to which everybody but the deceased is invited, like a wedding without the bride or a baptism without the baby, denies the essential reality of the occasion, misses the focal point. It is why we comb wreckage, drag rivers and…

A Hero of the Celtic Renaissance

From the cottage I keep in West Clare, I sometimes look across the Shannon Estuary to the Kerry Hills. From the end of the peninsula, I can make out Ballybunion, where Bill Clinton golfed in September 1998, in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio. Back in Washington, Senator Joseph Lieberman was calling Mr. Clinton’s…