'We feel bereft and emptied': Poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch on how mourning rituals help the living

As COVID-19 blazes through our communities, it is not only changing how we live: it has also fundamentally changed how we die — and how we act in the face of death.

Isolated not just in our daily lives, we're also isolated in mourning, unable to fall back on the familiar and comforting rituals we know, to grieve and honour the dead.

Across Canada, provinces and territories have instituted new laws around funeral activities, restricting the size of gatherings or banning them altogether. Outside this country, there have been harrowing reports of mass graves, hasty burials, sometimes of unclaimed remains, or piled up bodies waiting to be processed in temporary morgues.

"The things that we're intuitively drawn to when there's trouble — to be together, to be among one another — we are told we may not do," Thomas Lynch told The Sunday Edition's Michael Enright.

For almost four decades now, Lynch has ruminated over questions around dying and bereavement as both a small-town funeral director and as an award-winning poet and essayist.

His most recent book is a collection of essays called, The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be. He's also the author of the celebrated book, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.

Until recently, Thomas Lynch worked as a funeral director at Lynch & Sons in Milford, Michigan — a family business he took over from his father and has now passed on to his son.

Here are some highlights from his interview, edited for clarity and condensed.

The state of Michigan has had some of the highest death rates in the United States. What has that been like for you to witness, both personally and professionally?

It's such a strangeness to us. 

We feel … bereft and emptied by not being able to do what we otherwise would normally do at a time when a death occurs, or when a baby is born, or when we have to attend our recovery meetings. We're doing it virtually. 

As you and I speak, my son is live-streaming a funeral for a woman who I've known for 50 years. Her family, which is large and intertangled with everyone else in our town, cannot all be there. Her husband of 70 years now will not have the support of the neighbours and friends and distant family that would normally be there for this sadness.

What is the purpose of the funeral home in these times? You've said in earlier essays that by "getting the dead where they need to go, the living get where they need to be." Can that be fulfilled when everybody is living in isolation?

After many years of doing funerals, I figured out that there's this intermingling of purposes between the living and the dead. The dead, I wrote, don't care, but the dead matter to the living. 

And I still think that's true. It is only because things need to be dug, carried, lifted and hefted into the abyss that the living seem to be able to stand back after it's all over and say, "I did my part."

So it is hard when we can't gather together to sort these contingencies out. It is hard to figure how the living get through this. The essentials may be done — we'll get the dead to their fire, we'll get the dead to their grave, we'll get to the dead to whatever abyss we're deciding on for them — but you don't get to go the distance with them.

We feel … bereft and emptied by not being able to do what we otherwise would normally do at a time when a death occurs...- Thomas Lynch

You said in another essay that "mourning is romance in reverse." What did you mean by that?

It's a kind of letting go. In the way that romance calls us to embrace, mourning is a way of letting go — not by forgetting, but by remembering without pain. And we can't proclaim it. This is why I've always distrusted the word "closure." We can't proclaim closure. We might achieve an end of the pain associated with the death of a parent or a spouse or a lover or friend or a sibling. But we can't just proclaim it over.

And the funeral never did that. The funeral simply said, "we're going to get you going in the right direction" — by confronting the loss, naming the loss, claiming the loss and also by providing some narrative for what might happen next.

I've said before that there are only four essentials to a good funeral. You need a corpse — someone has to agree to quit breathing forever and nature provides those over and over and over. We need mourners — people to whom this matters, because if it doesn't matter to anybody, "So what" is the rhetorical question? We need a story. This is what the church has tried to provide over time. This is what poetry tries to do. We need a story for what happens next — what the person who's dead believed in, hoped for, kept faith by, feared. And finally, we have to get them where they need to go: transport. 

Those four things, each of them has to be nimble enough to deal with what's going on — and right now, I think we're learning how to be a little more nimble.

I think the bereavement letter, which fell out of fashion with the Victorians, might come back. It's a way of saying — in black and white, in print and by Postal Service — we know this happened, we hurt with you, we feel helpless too, we wish we could be among you. 

When I think of the kindness of strangers, I think of the men and women on the frontlines of our medical infrastructure, who are holding hands and hearing the last utterances of their fellow humans.- Thomas Lynch

What do we owe the dead?

Witness, I think, first of all. That's why I always say, "go the distance with them," wherever that is. Whether you're going to toss them in a ditch, or throw them in the sea, or leave them in a holy tree for the scavenger birds, go there with them and do the necessaries — whether the necessary is to lift or simply watch. 

That witness is a kind of bearing. We bear witness. And it's a heavier lift when it's someone you love. But the only way around these things is through them.

I just can't imagine the heartbreak of the tens of thousands of American families who haven't been able to be with their dying, because that needs witness too. And when I think of the kindness of strangers, I think of the men and women on the frontlines of our medical infrastructure, who are holding hands and hearing the last utterances of their fellow humans.

Do you think about your own death very often?

Daily, I suppose. I have for a long time said the numbers are convincing on this — hovering, as they do, around 100 per cent. 

[But] it occurred to me just the other day that I should start thinking not only as if I could be dead tomorrow, but that I might be alive tomorrow. And my hope is that one of the things that will change is the things that we'll live with — and the things that we won't. 

I really do think that we've been praying to Father God all these years and maybe Mother Nature is the god who is really trying to tell us something now: that it's time to heal the earth. Like climate change, it is the nature of our species to just say, "Well, let's wait and see." This virus tells us we cannot wait — we must make some change.

Click 'listen' above to hear the full interview.