"The Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade" by Thomas Lynch ***

• National Book Award Finalist
• Non-Fiction, Essays
• Michigan author of the year, 2001
• US author
• A poet and an undertaker
• Vocabulary:
• aubade: a piece sung or played outdoors at dawn, usually as a compliment to someone.
• obsequies:  funeral rites
• Preface:
• xvi....."Then and now we age with the grace (in Cummings' careful metaphor) of polar bears on rollerskates."....LOLOL! 
• xvii..."Faithless, hopeless, untutored in love, they make babies for the sake of company and kill themselves with unspeakable violence in staggering numbers--suffering from a deficiency in meaning acquired from pop culture, pop psychology, feel-good religion, that tells them don't worry, be happy, take care of yourself and your self-esteem.  The stand to inherit, along with the spiritual void their parents have left them, the bill from the card it was charged to."......just a typical cynicism about the younger generation or is he astute or is he being unintentionally critical in an effort to be witty?
• xviii..."Thus, undertakings are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisy blather, and the blinding dark.  It is the voice we give to wonderment, to pain, to love and desire, anger and outrage; the words that we shape into song and prayer."
• "The Undertaking":
• p.3..."Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople."  I never thought of it that way....
• p.13...."Milo had become the idea of himself, a permanent fixture of the third person and past tense, his widow's loss of appetite and trouble sleeping, the absence in places where we look for him, our habits of him breaking, our phantom limb, our one hand washing the other."
• "Gladstone":
• p.18...."...he loved to quote Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal who sounded lik a New Age Republican when he wrote that he could measure twith mathematical precision a people's respect for the laws of the land by the way they cared for their dead."
• p.21....."So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is 'just' anything rings as tinny in its attemp to minimalize as it would if we were to say it was 'just' a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy."
• p.22..."The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence.  They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents.  It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.
• p.25...."They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions--only those who do it well and those who don't"...what is not doing it well?
• "Crapper":
• Epigraph:  "Death and the sun are not to be looked at in the face." - La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
• p.30..."It was my first taste of Liberty--to crap out in the open air on the acreage of my ancestors, whilst listening to the sounds of morning: an aubade of birdwhistle and windsong."
• p.33...."Since4 Crapper's marvelous invention, we need only pull  the lever behind us and the evidence disappears, a kind of rapture that removes the nuisance.....having lost the regular necessity of dealing with unpleasantries, we have lost the ability to do so when the need arises.  And we have lost the community well versed in these calamities.  In short, when shit happens, we feel alone.".....introduction of the toilet.....interesting
• p.36..."Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out."
• p.37..."
• This is also why the funerals held in my funeral parlor lack an essential manifest--the connection of the baby born to the marriage made to the deaths we grieve in the life of a family."
• p.47..."Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us to run across Eaton Park while he practiced his marksmanship.  Today he is a colonel in the army and the rest of us are gun-shy."....LOLOLOL
• "The Right Hand of the Father":
• p.51...When we buy the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited.  Memory it she overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort."
• p.54..."The poor cousin of fear is anger."
• "Words Made Flesh":
• the artichoke poem written by a friend and published in the New Yorker
• p.72..."I tell Robin a version of what the old doctor, William Carlos Williams meant when he wrote that men die everyday for what they miss in poetry.  I tell him people are born, and reborn, everyday, who owe their very beings to poems"
• p.74...marriage poem
• "The Golfatorium":
• idea for combining a golf course and a cemetery
• p.80..."A reviewer of mine quite rightly calls poets the taxidermists of literature, wanting to freeze things in time, always inventing dead aunts and uncles to eulogize in verse."
• p.82..."Whether we bury the dead in Wilbert Vaults, leave them in trees to be eaten by birds, burn them or beam them into space; whether choir or cantor, piper or jazz band, casket or coffin or winding sheet, ours is the species that keeps track of our dead and knows that we are always outnumbered by them."
• p.84...."And to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see, than the one we imagine or read about in papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral."...an undertaker's concept
• "Mary & Wilbur":
• the rebuilding of a local bridge giving direct route to the cemetery, championed by local actress
• the author wrote a poem for the dedication of the new bridge
• "Sweeney":
• his friend, the hypochondriac...or is it a gift of understanding that we will die
• "All Hallows' Eve":
• the night he buried his mother
• "Uncle Eddie, Inc.":
• addresses the issue of assisted suicide and its impact on the undertaker's profession in the future
• "Jessica, the Hound and the Casket Trade":
• how to be sensitive as well as profitable
• "Tract":
• addresses his own wishes for his funereal
• Review:  I enjoyed this essay collection.  Lynch blends a combination of wit, sensitivity, and insight about the culture of death from a variety of perspectives.  I laughed out loud a few times and read while slowly nodding a few times as well.  It is not that he brings something new to light, rather that he faces the familiar head on.  I like that.