The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

Rating:
Summary: Reverent, Illustrative Insights on Death and Ritual
Review: Thomas Lynch guides us into a milieu through which we all will travel (at least once), but which few of us understand. "The Undertaking" is not a textbook of how the funeral business operates, but a series of reverent stories about people who have died, those who grieve them, and how the undertaker cares for both.

Lynch instructively reflects on the rituals associated with death (and death itself), and reinforces the importance of treating these moments of our ultimate disposition with respect and gravity. This perhaps is the most important aspect of the book.

As well, Lynch sometimes humorously, sometimes poignantly, reveals to us the complexity of working in the dismal trade--running a business that sells a product no one wants to buy, while doing it with patience and compassion.

My only criticism is that, throughout the book, Lynch constantly instructs us that the dead don't care what happens to them. Indeed, wakes and funerals are balm for the living, but who knows what the departed know? Wouldn't we all like to believe that, after the unfortunate end, we could attend our own funeral?

Rating:
Summary: The Dead Don't Care
Review: Thomas Lynch's book, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, is an emotional bungee jump, hurling your mood to an all time low, only to bring you back to out loud laughter. Lynch covers many topics from the political history of his town, Milford, to the actual embalming of his own father to prepare him for his "afterlife." Mr. Lynch pounds home the verifiable truth that "the dead don't care". No matter how careful or careless we tend to be in the planning of memorial services, funerals, etc. Lynch contests that we are just doing it for ourselves and truly "the dead don't care." Thomas Lynch has many hands on experiences that he logs through out his emotional roller coaster of a book. This is a MUST READ for anyone who has lost or will lose someone close to you. THAT MEANS YOU!!!

Rating:
Summary: A Poet/Undertaker writes brilliantly/wittily on the end game
Review: Waterstones at Notting Hill, London, provided me with this perfect vacation reading. About the final act of the living for the newly departed, it seems the ideal vacation book, for is not death, after all, the endless vacation?Thomas Lynch, middle-Westerner, Poet honored in England and sadly invisible in the States, writes movingly, wittily, fantastically, of the final rites of the living.These essays are by turn reflections on the deeply personal, as in burying one's father; send-ups of the American penchant for the bottom line (the essay on combining the green and grief of the cemetary with the practicality of the golfing mania); the daily fact of death and the professional's chosen role to deal with it honorably, gracefully, and thoughtfully. This is perhaps not a book about death so much as about life and the living; a book about others' final moments and our survival of them until the final moment is ours. By which such time, if we listen to the practiced language and balanced attitude of this Poet/Undertaker, we will perhaps be prepared for our own final and inevitable undertaking