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Overview
“[Lynch] brings the lessons of death to life, and turns life and death into art.” —Time Out New York
Here is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between “the living and the living who have died” with outrage and amazement, awe and calm, straining for the brief glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species.
Synopsis
“[Lynch] brings the lessons of death to life, and turns life and death into art.” —Time Out New York
USA Today
Lynch's vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community — and the secret places of the heart.
Editorials
Spin
“A startling and eloquent meditation on death and bereavement.”Esquire
“A memoir that is stand-out superb.”New York Times
“Forceful, authentic and full of a kind of ethical and aesthetic clarity.”The Nation
“One of the most life-affirming books I have read . . . brims with humanity, irreverence, and invigorating candor.”USA Today
“Lynch’s vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community—and the secret places of the heart.”Nation
A National Book Award finalist, this collection of unique essays 'brims with humanity, irreverence, and invigorating candor.'USA Today
Lynch's vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community — and the secret places of the heart.Booknews
As an undertaker and poet, Lynch pays unique homage to 'the living who have died' and funeral rites. He even posits the idea of a golfatorium. Several of these essays appeared previously in Harper's and The London Review of Books.The Nation
A National Book Award finalist, this collection of unique essays 'brims with humanity, irreverence, and invigorating candor.'USA Today
Lynch's vivid prose has the electricity of writing that tells us what is going on in the secret places of the community -- and the secret places of the heart.Kirkus Reviews
Eloquent, meditative observations on the place of death in small-town life, from the only poet/funeral director in Milford, Michigan. Poets like Lynch (Grimalkin and Other Poems) tend to be more respectful about death and the grave than novelists like Evelyn Waugh or journalists like Jessica Mitford. Lynch lives by the old- fashioned undertakers' motto, 'Serving the living by caring for the dead' (as opposed to more mundanely providing, as one seminar put it, '`What Folks Want in a Casket').Taking up the family business, Lynch philosophically bears his responsibilities in Milford, which has its statistical share of accidents, suicides, murders, and grieving survivors. His essential respect for the living and the dead notwithstanding, his shop talk perforce has its morbid aspects, such as making 'pre-arrangements' with future clients, reminding families about uncollected cremation ashes, taking middle-of-the-night calls for collection, or, in a rare filial obligation, embalming his own father. But the author has a sense of the absurd possibilities of his business, even a whimsical scheme to run a combination golf course/burial ground. In one of the livelier essays, he reflects on the competition—both professional and philosophical—fellow Michiganite Dr. Jack Kevorkian, with his no-muss suicide machine, poses to Uncle Eddie's postmortem-clean-up business, Specialized Sanitation Services ('`Why leave a mess? Call Triple S!').
In the high point of these dozen essays, he combines his profession and his vocation, delivering the dedicatory poem for the reopening of the restored bridge to Milford's old cemetery—'This bridge connects our daily lives to them,/and makesthem, once our neighbors, neighbors once again.'