The Undertaking Read online

  And as I watch my generation labor to give their teenagers and young adults some “family values” between courses of pizza and Big Macs, I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. 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. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment. McFunerals, McFamilies, McMarriage, McValues. This is the mathematical precision the old Britisher was talking about and what my father was talking about when he said we’d know what to do.

  Thus tending to his death, his dead body, had for me the same importance as being present for the births of my sons, my daughter. Some expert on Oprah might call this “healing.” Another on Donahue might say “cathartic.” Over on Geraldo it might have “scarred him for life.” And Sally Jesse Whatshername might mention “making good choices.” As if they were talking about men who cut umbilical cords and change diapers or women who confront their self-esteem issues or their date rapists.

  It is not about choices or functions or psychological correctness. A dead body has had its options limited, its choices narrowed. It is an old thing in the teeth of which we do what has been done because it is the thing to do. We needn’t reinvent the wheel or make the case for it, though my generation always seems determined to.

  And they are at it over on the other island. Trying to reinvent the funeral as “a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief,” which, of course, it is; or as “a brief therapy for the acutely bereaved,” which, of course, it is. There will be talk of “stages,” “steps,” “recovery.” Someone will mention “aftercare,” “post-funeral service follow-up,” Widow to Widow programs, Mourners Anonymous? And in the afternoons they’ll play nine holes, or go snorkeling or start cocktails too early and after dinner they’ll go dancing then call home to check in with their offices just before they go to bed, to check on the gross sales, to see who among their townspeople has died.

  Maybe I’ll take the boat over tomorrow. Maybe some of the old timers are there—men of my father’s generation, men you could call in the middle of the night if there was trouble. They remind me of my father and of Gladstone. Maybe they’ll say I remind them of him.

  Crapper

  Death and the sun are not to be looked at in the face.

  —LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, MAXIMS

  Don Paterson and I were crossing the Wolfe Tone Bridge in Galway contemplating Thomas Crapper. This was at early o’clock in the morning on our way back from an awful curry at the only Indian restaurant open in Galway in the wee hours. The night was mild, and our thoughts drifted toward talk of Crapper as the air behind us burned with the elemental fire of flatulence. It was an awful curry.

  Why else would two internationally unknown poets, in Galway to recite our internationally unheard of poems, the guests of the Cuirt Festival of Literature, be talking about the implications of the invention of the flush toilet and about its inventor, that dismal man whose name shall forever be associated with shit? Why else?

  Here, after all, was an opportunity to tender vengeance toward the man who’d damned, by faint praise, my most recent book of poems—in the TLS for chrissakes! Indeed, given Don’s fairly damaged condition—a night of drink, the aforementioned curry—I could have pitched him headlong into the Corrib and watched him bob up and down out to Galway Bay humming like Bing Crosby, an odd and gaseous swan gone belly-up from bad food and good riddance. But really the review wasn’t as bad as it was, well, “fair” and any ink is better than no ink, after all. And I like Don. He’s an amiable Scot, a Dundonian, and a crackerjack poet if, like myself, not exactly a household name. It could be worse, I tell myself. We could be Crappers. And he still drinks well, in a way I never did, allowing excess to be its own reward—a little change from the teetotal life I live back in Michigan, where I haven’t had a drink in years, suffering as I do from all of the “F” words: I’m fortyish, a father of four, a funeral director, and full of fear for what might happen if I go back on the Black Bush. So I don’t.

  The first time I was ever in Ireland was twenty-seven years ago. Driven by curiosity about my family and my affection for the poetry of William Butler Yeats—an internationally known poet—I saved up a hundred dollars beyond the cost of a oneway ticket and lit out, twenty and cocksure, for Ireland. Several of my generation were going off to Vietnam at the time but I’d drawn high numbers in the Nixon lotto so I was free to go.

  What made me so cocksure was the faith that my parents would bail me out if I got too deep into trouble. So I wasn’t exactly like Kerouac or Woody Guthrie but I was, nonetheless, on the road. Or more precisely, flying the friendly skies. When I located my cousins Tommy and Nora Lynch—brother and sister, bachelor and spinster—they lived in a thatched house on the west coast of Clare, in the townland of Moveen, with flagstone floors, two light sockets, a hot plate and open hearth, and no plumbing. Water existed five fields down the land, bubbling up in a miracle of springwater, clear and cold and clean. I soon learned to grab the bucket and a bit of the Clare Champion and on my way down for the precious water, I’d squat to my duties and wipe my ass with the obits or want ads or the local news. 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.

  Tommy and Nora kept cows, saved hay, went to the creamery and, as any farmer knows, dung is a large part of that bargain. It greens the grass that feeds the cow that makes the milk and shits again: a paradigm for the internal combustion engine, a closed system, efficient as an old Ford. And so the addition of my little bits of excrement to the vast dung-covered acreage was hardly noticeable, like personal grief among paid wailers, it gets lost in the shuffle and becomes anonymous and safe. This is the model for the food chain: the elements of feed, cowshit and what-have-ye, get lost in the shuffle by the time we sit down to the Delmonico or t-bone, likewise we are blind to the copulation of chickens and the habits of pigs when we sit down to the bacon and the eggs. The process blurs—dead fish make onions grow, manure turns into hamburger and tossed salad.

  It was a good life. After nights of song and stories and poetry, common in the country in those years before televisions replaced the fire on the floor as the thing stared at and into, I would step out the back door of the cottage and take my stance amid the whitethorn trees my great-great-grandfather had planted years ago as saplings brought home from a horse fair in Kilrush. And looking up into the bright firmament I’d piss the porter out—I was young, I drank too much—and in the midst of this deliverance I’d look up into the vast firmament, as bright in its heaven as the dark was black, and think thoughts of Liberty and be thankful to be alive.

  Years after, I would try to replicate these reveries when I found myself living in a large old house on Liberty Boulevard in a small town in Michigan. I lived next door to my funeral home and, returning in the early mornings from embalming one of my townspeople, I’d stop near the mock-orange tree by the back door of my home and look up into the heavens and relieve myself. Some nights I would espy Orion or the Pleiades and think of mythologies blurred in my remembrance of them and be thankful for the life of the body and the mind.

  Such was the firmament this night in Galway. Don and I had stood shoulder to shoulder before the famous green storefront of Kenny’s Bookshop in High Street, swooning and stuporous to see our books, our faces, and bold notice of our readings there in the window among the stars. And despite the flatus, harbinger of impending disaster, Don and I were glad to be alive. Glad for the soft air of springtime, somehow sweeter in Galway than Dundee or Michigan. And glad to be paid for giving out with poems when so few can say they were ever paid for the inner workings of their souls. And glad, I daresay, for t
he rooms provided for us at the Atlanta Hotel in Dominick Street by the Festival Committee—rooms with solid beds and flush toilets toward which we made our gaseous ways that mild Marchy night in the City of the Tribes.

  I still have the house in West Clare. Tommy died and Nora outlived him by twenty-one years, living alone by the fire. Then Nora died, just shy of her ninetieth birthday, a tidy jaundiced corpse, made little and green by pancreatic cancer. She left the house to me. I was her family. I kept coming back to West Clare after that first time, year after year, though the visits were shortened by the building of my business and the making of babies.

  When her brother Tommy died, in 1971, she rode the bike into town and called from the post office. I flew over in time for the wake and funeral. I think that was when she began to count me as her next of kin—the one she could call and be sure I’d come. I think that’s when she began to trust me with her own obsequies, mention of which was never made until the week before she died.

  Of course, first among the several changes I made was the addition of a toilet and shower. I added on a room out the back door and put in a bathroom like a French bordello, all tile and glowing fixtures. I had a septic tank sunk in the back haggard and declared the place all the more habitable for the trouble. I let it to writers when I’m not there.

  But for every luxury there is a loss. Just as the installation of a phone when Nora was eighty cost her the excitement of letters coming up the road with John Willie McGrath, the postman on his bike, and the installation of a television when she was eighty-five meant that her friends gave up their twisting relations in favor of Dallas reruns, so the introduction of modern toiletry removed from Moveen forever the liberty of walking out into the night air or the morning mist with a full bowel or bladder and having at the landscape in ways that can only be called “close to nature.”

  The thing about the new toilet is that it removes the evidence in such a hurry. The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has “civilized” us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish. No more the morning office of the chamber pot or outhouse, where sights and sounds and odors reminded us of the corruptibility of flesh. Since Crapper’s marvelous invention, we need only pull the lever behind us and the evidence disappears, a kind of rapture that removes the nuisance. This dynamic is what the sociologist, Phillip Slater, called “The Toilet Assumption,” back in the seventies in a book called The Pursuit of Loneliness. He was right: 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.

  It is the same with our dead. We are embarrassed by them in the way that we are embarrassed by a toilet that overflows the night that company comes. It is an emergency. We call the plumber.

  I sometimes think the only firms that put their names on what they do anymore are firms that make toilets and direct funerals. In both cases there seems to be an effort to sound trustworthy, stable, established, honest. Twyford’s Adamant, Armitage Shanks, Moen & Moen, Kohler come to mind. Most other enterprises seem hidden behind some “assumed name” someone is “Doing Business As.” Drugstores and real estate agents have given up the surnames of their owners for the more dodgy corporate identities of BuyRite or PayLess or Real Estate One. Doctors and lawyers have followed, taking in their shingles and putting out neon with murky identities and corporate cover. Drygoods and greengrocers, furniture merchants, saloons and restaurants—all gone now to malls and marts and supermarkets with meaningless or fictional monikers. But funeral homes and water-closets still stubbornly proclaim the name of the ones you’ll be doing business with. Lynch & Sons is the name of ours. Is it ego or identity crisis? I sometimes ask myself.

  The house I live in here on Liberty was built in 1880. It had no plumbing at first. It had a cistern in the cellar to collect rainwater and likely had a pump in the kitchen and an outhouse in the backyard surrounded by lilacs. Next to the kitchen was a birthing room where agreeable women of that age had their babies. It was next to the kitchen because, as everyone knows, the having of babies and the boiling of water were gerundives forever linked in the common wisdom of the day. And after the babies were born and showed good signs of living (no sure thing then—more than half of the deaths in 1900 were children under twelve), they were christened, often in a room up front, the priest or parson standing between the aunts and uncles and grandparents that populated the households of that era, where everybody looked liked the Waltons with their John-Boys and Susans and goodnight Grampaws. These were big families, made large by the lovemaking of parents before the mercy of birth control turned families into Mommy and Daddy and 2.34 Johnnies and Sues and the modern welfare state turned households into Mommy and babies and a phantom man—like the “bull brought in a suitcase” to dairy cows in West Clare.

  The homes were large to house multiple births and generations. These were households in which, just as babies were being birthed, grandparents were aging upstairs with chicken soup and doctors’ home visits until, alas, they died and were taken downstairs to the same room the babies were christened in to get what was called then, “laid out.” Between the births and deaths were the courtships—sparkings and spoonings between boys and girls just barely out of their teens, overseen by a maiden aunt who traded her talents for childcare and housekeeping for her place in the household. The smitten young people would sit on a “love seat”—large enough to look into each other’s eyes and hold hands, small enough to prevent them getting horizontal. The aunt would appear at strategic intervals to ask about lemonade, teas, room temperatures, the young man’s family. Decorum was maintained. The children married, often in the same room—the room with large pocket doors drawn for privacy and access. The room in which grandparents were waked and new babies were baptized and love was proffered and contracted—the parlor.

  Half a century, two world wars, and the New Deal later, homes got smaller and garages got bigger as we moved these big events out of the house. The emphasis shifted from stability to mobility. The architecture of the family and the homes they lived in changed forever by invention and intervention and by the niggling sense that such things didn’t belong in the house. At the same time, the birthing room became the downstairs “bath”—emphasis upon the cleanly function of indoor plumbing. Births were managed in the sparkling wards of hospitals, or for real romance, on the way, in cars. A common fiction had some hapless civil servant or taxi man birthing a baby in the backseat of a squad car or Buick. The same backseat, it was often assumed, where the baby was invented—sparking and spooning under the supervision of Aunt Cecilia having given way to “parking” under the patrol of Officer Mahoney. Like most important things, courtship was done en route, in transit, on the lam, in a car. Retirees were deported to Sun City. Elders grew aged and sickly not upstairs in their own beds, but in a series of institutional venues: rest homes, nursing homes, hospital wards, sanitoria. Which is where they died: the chance, in 1960, of dying in your own bed: less than one in ten.

  And having lived their lives and died their deaths outside the home, they were taken to be laid out, not in the family parlor but to the funeral parlor, where the building was outfitted to look like the family parlors gone forever, busy with overstuffed furniture, fern stands, knickknacks, draperies, and the dead.

  This is how my business came to be.

  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. And if the family that prayed together stayed together in accordance with the churchy bromide, the one that shits together rarely sticks together.

  We have no parlors anymore, no hearthsides. We have, rather, our family rooms in which light flickers from the widescreen multichannel TV on which we watch reruns of a life we are not familiar with. Kitchens are not cooked in, dining rooms go dusty. Living rooms are a kind of mausole
a reserved for “company” that seldom comes. Lovemaking is done on those “getaway” weekends at the Hyatt or the Holidome. New homes are built with fewer bedrooms and more full baths. (Note how a half bath is not called a whole crapper.) And everyone has their “personal space,” their privacy. The babies are in daycare, the elders are in Arizona or Florida or a nursing home with people their own age, and mom and dad are busting ass to pay for their “dream house” or the remodeled “master suite” where nothing much happens anymore of any consequence.

  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. I have no weddings or baptisms in the funeral home and the folks that pay me have maybe lost sight of the obvious connections between the life and the death of us. And how the rituals by which we mark the things that only happen to us once, birth and death, or maybe twice in the case of marriage, carry the same emotional mail—a message of loss and gain, love and grief, things changed utterly.

  And just as bringing the crapper indoors has made feces an embarrassment, pushing the dead and dying out has made death one. Often I am asked to deal with the late uncle in the same way that Don Paterson and I were about to ask Armitage Shanks to deal with the bad curry—out of sight out of mind. Make it go away, disappear. Push the button, pull the chain, get on with life. The trouble is, of course, that life, as any fifteen-year-old can tell you, is full of shit and has but one death. And to ignore our excrement might be good form, while to ignore our mortality creates an “imbalance,” a kind of spiritual irregularity, psychic impaction, a bunging up of our humanity, a denial of our very nature.