I like the way Thomas Lynch writes in his book, “Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans.” It sounds slightly old-timey — wise with an almost iridescent quality that brings me right into the heart of the landscapes he describes — Moveen West, County Clare, Ireland. For a moment, his narration even reads as though he might have an Irish lilt. But as he welcomed me into his home on the shore of Mullett Lake, Michigan, I quickly realized that no degree of profound connection to one’s ancestral home (as Lynch seeks and discovers in this memoir) can turn a Michigan accent into an Irish one.
Though we share the same last name, and though my paternal grandfather’s name was also Thomas Lynch, the author Thomas Lynch and I are not related. Lynch and I are both from Oakland County, Michigan and even though we can both trace parts of our ancestry back to Ireland (County Clare for him, County Galway for myself) there is nothing that connects us in our familial history. My sister and I were startled looking at a photo of Lynch on his website that, with cloudy blue eyes, a red beard turning white and wire spectacles, bears a shocking resemblance to our own dad — who, coincidentally, has been an avid Thomas Lynch reader since picking up a copy of “The Undertaking” at a Mackinac Island bookstore in 2001.
This Thomas Lynch is a poet, author and, curiously enough, a former funeral director with Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors in Milford, Michigan (though now he’s stepped back and sticks to writing the occasional obituary). It’s a family business started in 1948 that has since expanded to encompass three generations of Lynches and seven locations across southeastern Michigan.
Lynch writes and speaks about death with refreshing candor — and intentionally so. In our time together, we spoke about the American cultural experience that insists on being so detached from the hard realities of death and instead latches on to what Lynch referred to as “the bother”: decorative urns, elaborate flower arrangements and memorial services over brunch. The process of cremation, and a general sense of aversion to the logistics of the process, is a stark example.
“I say they’re missing something. I say there’s something about having to bear their own dead — wherever they’re going — that’s better than nothing,” Lynch said. “We associate fire with punishment and waste. People’s associations with fire are largely negative, but as soon as someone dies, they say, ‘Oh, just cremate him.’”
Lynch told me as a funeral director, he would often encourage mourners of the deceased to take a more active role in the cremation process — to go to the crematory and witness the body and read a prayer or a poem.
“We do it so poorly in this country,” Lynch said, pointing to the existence of cremation as a public, community-engaged ceremony in Kolkata, India.
Much seems to connect back to visions of life and death for Lynch — understandably so. Outside of his work at Lynch & Sons, he always knew he wanted to write, citing in part the eternality of books — which, dare I say, is poetically similar to the sentiments of James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Speaking about Michael Heffernan, a poet friend who recently passed away, he said, “You can pretty much conjure him up anytime you want, just by reading his poems. I like that idea.”
To Lynch, poetry comes first as an instinctual response to process any moment; he refers to it as “a permanent record of what happened.” From life, Lynch draws poems, and from poems, he draws prose. An example he frequently returned to was his poem “No Prisoners,” written immediately after a conversation with his father about a devastating battle during World War 2. This poem, initially published in “Still Life in Milford,” is now serving as the jumping-off point for his upcoming novel. Lynch sees poems as living entities, never quite finished — the building blocks for sentences and prose.
“It’s like the tuning fork for language,” he said.
Lynch also writes frequently about Ireland and the community he’s discovered in Moveen, County Clare through visiting (and later caretaking for) his ancestral home.
“Don’t forget Tommy and Nora Lynch on the banks of the River Shannon,” Lynch remembers hearing recited in prayer as a child. “This was part of the first poetry of my life — the raised speech of blessing and remembrance, names of people and places far away …” he writes in “Booking Passage”.
And so after drawing a high number in the Vietnam War draft lottery, he bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. “I had to do something,” he said.
The late selection of his birthday afforded him this opportunity to honor the call to Moveen — that which he witnessed in prayer growing up and later began to feel deeply as an undeniable pull to the landscapes where his ancestors had been born and died solidified itself within his character as he experienced Ireland for the first time, knowing all that came before him.
“It is very much a homeplace,” he said. “I spent so many hours just talking with Nora by the fire. I just always felt when I walked in the door, I was home again. It never felt strange.”
In Moveen, things are different than in the United States. People gossip, and “can be very wicked,” Lynch said, but there’s a general sense of goodwill and accountability within the community. Irish funeral customs differ significantly as well.
“Particularly in rural Ireland, up until the last 25 years, the neighbors took care of everything. You’re on your own. There’s no professional class of people who are going to do all this,” Lynch said. “And as they would say of my cousin Nora years after she died: ‘By God, Nora would love a night like this.’ So the dead are not vanquished. Here, they’re more or less vanquished.”
Lynch spoke of two distinct and separate occasions following someone’s passing in Ireland. The first would be an immediate wake, mass and burial, and the second would be called the month’s mind. It’s a mass ceremony that takes place a month post-death and is meant to celebrate the progress made thus far in mourning the deceased.
“The Irish keep the dead alive, even though in doing so they keep some of the heartache fresh,” Lynch said.
Much of his time connected to Moveen, though, was clouded by a multi-decade battle with the Irish Land Commission who aimed to seize control of the property. Culminating in a series of lengthy and eloquently written letters between Lynch and political figures in Dublin, the land and home eventually were legally returned to their rightful owners.
“It is my hope you will help us do it,” Lynch writes in his initial 2001 request to Sile de Valera, Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands. “If so I will keep a record of it. If not, I’ll keep the record of that too. I am a writer. It is what writers do.”
***
One of my favorite moments in “Booking Passage” comes at the very beginning as Lynch describes his brother Pat’s first visit to Moveen which coincided with the wake of their cousin, Nora Lynch.
“Big Pat stood between an inkling of the long dead and the body of the lately dead and felt the press of family history, like the sea thrown finally against the shore, tidal and undulant and immediate,” Lynch writes. “He inhaled the air … and knew that though he’s never been in this place before … he was, in ways he could neither articulate nor deny, home.”
There’s a common Irish saying — céad míle fáilte — that literally means “100,000 welcomes.” I can picture it eternalized on a bronze placard on the front door of my childhood home and printed on the ferry ticket to Beaver Island where I’m writing this piece from now. In so many spaces where Irish influence has passed or the Irish people have settled, this phrase returns. It represents the traditional Irish spirit of hospitality — a trope with a history undeniably complicated yet simultaneously real. Even as a child born and raised in Michigan, several generations removed from Galway, I’ve felt some small twinge of attraction to the Emerald Isle — romanticized and overly nostalgic, sure, but compelling all the same. In our conversation, Lynch showed me that these are the gut feelings that lead you to find a community where 100,000 welcomes wash over you and you know, unequivocally, that you belong.
While this is ultimately a piece meant to profile Michigan author and poet Thomas Lynch, whose work in literary spheres and funeral homes I admire and respect, it began and ended with small moments of connection that transcended the strings of our lives that otherwise run untouching. I sought out a conversation with him in an effort to form a connection between an established writer and an aspiring one, inspired by shared family names and my dad’s devotion to his writing, and I left his window-enclosed study in deep reverence for his exploration of self, ancestry, life and death through writing — a feeling I’d had on the tip of my tongue for years but never been able to pin down until I witnessed such an acute example in my recent visit with Lynch.
“No Prisoners”, Lynch’s poem about his father’s retelling of Walt’s Ridge — a World War II battle where orders to kill wounded Japanese soldiers led Lynch to describe that night in January 1944 as a “moral trespass for an Orthodox Catholic boy” — eventually reached the computer screens of two sons of soldiers who’d known his dad during the war. Both reached out separately, weeping at the concentrated emotional power of Lynch’s poetry and how the story had found its way back to the people who wanted to know it.
“It just amazes me to be an internationally ignored poet, and yet you connect with the very people who have a stake in (the story),” Lynch said. “I think that’s magic.”
It did feel like magic, but maybe that’s because good writing is conducive to the kind of magic we attribute to fate or destiny. Lynch has seemingly found a way to harness the magnetism of the universe, letting poems unearth cross-generational connection, encouraging the alive to look boldly into the eyes of death and honoring the intangible sensation of being called back to a home you have never truly known before.
As I walked outside and away from the house of Thomas Lynch, he said to me, “Our paths will cross again — I’m sure of it.” Thomas Lynch knows how to connect across time and space, life and death, writing and speaking, and I have no reason not to believe that if our paths once crossed before, they certainly could again.
Statement Columnist Katie Lynch can be reached at katiely@umich.edu.
The post ‘It is what writers do’: Connecting with Thomas Lynch across the metaphysical appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply