The undertaking
I've been reading The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch. It's a collection of essays about Lynch's life as a funeral director in Milford Michigan. It's a bit hard to get through. He's a self proclaimed poet and is incredibly wordy and in my opinion, tries to fluff himself with larger than life words and descriptions...but if you can push through the fluff, the meat of what he's saying is beautiful.
I just finished reading his chapter on children's death and was struck by how he so correctly describes the devastation of loss when he himself has never personally been there. Here's an excerpt:
..."The fathers, used to protecting and paying, felt helpless. The mothers seemed to carry a pain in their innards that made them appear breakable. The overwhelming message on their faces was that nothing mattered anymore, nothing."
.... "When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than what it was, but the past all the same, portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.
When we bury infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no know ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams."
I just finished reading his chapter on children's death and was struck by how he so correctly describes the devastation of loss when he himself has never personally been there. Here's an excerpt:
..."The fathers, used to protecting and paying, felt helpless. The mothers seemed to carry a pain in their innards that made them appear breakable. The overwhelming message on their faces was that nothing mattered anymore, nothing."
.... "When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than what it was, but the past all the same, portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.
When we bury infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no know ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams."
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