Undertaking to take the sting out of death

MEMENTO MORI, but don't let the realisation get you down. A sympathetic undertaker who is a good writer can help. Thomas Lynch, an American poet of Irish descent who directs funerals in Milford, a small town in Michigan, has put together this collection of his elegant, humane, wryly matter of fact essays to remind you that you must die, but to assure you that death is not really bad once you are there.

As an undertaker, one of the nine children of an undertaker, he is concerned with the tidy disposal of the dead, not for their sake but to ease the sorrow of surviving kin and friends.

"This is the central fact of my business," he writes, ". . . that there is nothing, once you are dead, that can be done to you or for you or with you or about you that will do you any good or any harm; that any damage or decency we do accrues to the living, to whom your death happens, if it really happens to anyone. The living have to live with it. You don't."

The proprietor of Lynch & Sons, undertakers, is a past president of the Milford Chamber of Commerce, a Rotarian, divorced and off the drink. With disarming candour, he introduces himself as a businessman first; his poetic sensibility and talent become apparent gradually, later.

"Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople," he declares. "Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned. . . In a good year the gross is close to a million, 5 per cent of which we hope to call profit. I am the only undertaker in this town. I have a corner on the market."

He does his utmost to prepare corpses for display as unhorrifyingly as possible in open coffins, but it is clear that he is no Mr Joboy, the character from Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, embalming the dead with vulgar cosmetic extravagance. The Undertaking is a persuasive defence against Waugh's jaundiced view and Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death. After all, in a capitalist society there is nothing wrong with an undertaker's selling his services for more than they cost.

Lynch has inherited a sense of balance from his father and mother. The father, "as a funeral director . . . was accustomed to random and unreasonable damage. He had learned to fear." He saw evidence in the dead bodies of the young that "God lived by the Laws of Nature, and obeyed its statutes, however brutal". The mother, a devout Catholic, "left big things to God". Having more faith than her husband, she serenely accepted suffering as a means of gaining heavenly credit. They made a strong team.

Thomas Lynch writes most earnestly and scathingly in opposition to abortion and suicide. After Jack Kevorkian, an American believer in euthanasia, was legally acquitted of helping people to kill themselves, Lynch adapted the name as a substitute for traditional obscenities, as in "Go Kevork yourself".

Lynch expresses himself lightly in response to complaints that cemeteries are a waste of land. He advocates "The Golfatorium" in the style of Swift's "A Modest Proposal". In an 18 hole golf course, Lynch suggests, there would be space for 160,000 burials, ashes in bunkers and water hazards and entombments in the walls of the clubhouse. "And think of the gimmicks - free burial for a hole in one ..."

He cherishes his Irishness. One of the book's frontispieces is a detail from a street map of Galway, showing Lynch's Castle and Lynch's Window. For the past 27 years he has been a frequent visitor to his Irish ancestral home. Tommy and Nora Lynch, cousins of his, left him a house in the townland of Moveen in West Clare.

In a chapter of what might be called grave finality, Thomas Lynch prescribes the arrangements for his own funeral, on a cold, grey day in February. The prospect of burial in Michigan at its most Arctic does not obviate all hope. In spite of all he said earlier about posthumous oblivion, he concludes: "All I really wanted was a witness. To say I was. To say, daft as it still sounds, maybe I am."

Perhaps Mother knew best.