CHAPTER 1

HOW WE COME TO BETHE ONES WE ARE

Thomas Lynch

In the summer of 2012, Gus Nichols, one of Dublin'sgreat undertakers and the President of FIAT-IFTA, the InternationalFederation of Thanatologists Associations, invited me toIreland to speak on a subject of my choosing. FIAT-IFTA is acongress of funeral directors from around the world and at this,their twelfth international convention, there would be representativesfrom thirty nations, two hundred and fifty registrantsin 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 ourNational Funeral Directors Association and traveled with meas a delegate from the United States to thank Gus, FinbarrO'Connor and, indeed, several members of the Irish Associationof Funeral Directors for having traveled to Chicago theyear before to participate in Pat's convention. There would be agala banquet and golf outing, tours of Glasnevin Cemetery andthe Titanic Exhibition in Belfast, and plenty of good shoppingin Grafton Street. The conference was held in Dublin Castle, ahuge, walled compound in the center of that ancient city, withturrets and towers, dungeons and courtyards, dating to early inthe thirteenth century—eight hundred years of history oozingfrom its stones. And I found myself constructing a line for theobituary I am always editing in my head that would someday inthe long-distant future read, "He had presented to funeral directorsfrom around the world." Travel and castles will do that toyou. I was grateful for the invitation.

I had been to the castle once before. Indeed, I'd been toIreland dozens of times in the forty-some years since my firstvisit there in the winter of 1970, in search of my roots and myfuture, as twentysomethings are wont to do. But my first visitto Dublin Castle was in the late 1980s, to the offices of PoetryIreland, which were housed there in Bermingham Tower, toarrange for a reading tour of the country after my first book ofpoems was published.

And now, twenty-five years and several books later, risingto speak about our common calling to a room full of mortuarysorts from Asia and Africa and the Americas, from Europe andthe Antipodes and just down the road, it seemed as if my life'sworks and preoccupations—poetry and funerals, the literary andthe mortuary arts—were finally melding into one. They were, inmany ways, the same but different: equal tributaries of the oneenterprise. So much so, in fact, that I had titled my presentationafter 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 poemsto colleagues from around the world in Dublin Castle in the middleof June? It felt like a gift and I felt lucky and exceptionallyfortunate and it made me wonder, as Gus Nichols was givingme a generous introduction and I was gathering my papers andthoughts together and readying to rise to the august occasion,and praying, as we do, not to make the huge fool of myself that Ihave 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 itsounds a little like "wolves" or some especially feral class ofcreature. Not in the apish, nativist sense of immigrant hordes,rather in the fierce faith and family loyalties, the pack dynamicsof their clannishness, their vigilance and pride. My parentswere grandchildren of immigrants who had mostly marriedwithin their tribe. They'd sailed from nineteenth-century povertyinto the prospects of North America, from West Clareand Tipperary, Sligo and Kilkenny, to Montreal and Ontario,upper and lower Michigan. Graces and O'Haras, Ryans andLynchs—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 expanseof 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 ona table, bad luck in some numbers, good fortune in others.Odd lights in the nightscape foreshadowed death; dogs' eyesattracted lightning; the curse of an old woman could lay onelow. The clergy were to be "given what's going to them," butotherwise, "not to be tampered with." Priests were feared andtheir favor curried—their curses and blessings opposing polesof the powerful medicine they were known to possess. Everythinghad meaning beyond the obvious. The dead were everywhereand their ghosts inhabited the air and memory and theirold haunts, real as ever, if in an only slightly former tense, inconstant need of care and appeasement. They were, like thesaints they'd been named for, prayed over, prayed to, invokedas protection against all enemies, their names recycled throughgenerations, reassigned to new incarnations.

My mother thought I might become a priest. Not because Iwas especially holy; rather, as a devout and Catholic...