Digging literature: Undertaker poet Thomas Lynch comes to Old Town

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Thomas Lynch can’t get away from death. Last weekend, the longtime Milford funeral director, poet and essayist was at his summer home on Mullett Lake, fighting an invasion of mice that made it all the way into his silverware drawer while he was away for two months.

The tiny drama will surely find its way into one of Lynch’s essays, if not his informal talk Sunday at Old Town’s UrbanBeat.

He heard the crack of a trap at 1 a.m., but wasn’t in the mood for removal work, even on a small scale.

“I thought, I’ll remove the corpse in the morning,” he said. As Lynch points out in his signature essay, “The Undertaking,” the dead don’t care. Time and space have become “mortally unimportant” to them.

But the next morning, Lynch found the trap empty and the mouse, alive, behind a basket. He let it outside.

A quiet study in mortality, chance and unexpected grace, played out 2 inches above the ground, sounds like the perfect germ for a Lynch essay.

“That mouse will come back to haunt us, not exactly as a zombie, but as a mutant,” he predicted.

Sunday’s Lansing talk is a rare chance to meet the undertaker whose reflections on 45 years in the “dismal trade,” and other sundry obsessions, have earned a slew of honors, including the American Book Award. “The Undertaking,” a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award, was the subject of a PBS “Frontline” film that won an Emmy in 2008.

Despite the acclaim, daily dealings with death have left Lynch firmly grounded. He was amused by the name given to Sunday’s event by its sponsors, MSU’s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, the Lansing Poetry Club and the Michigan Institute for Contemporary Art.

“For the last 50 years, ‘an afternoon with Thomas Lynch’ usually meant somebody had to quit breathing and get horizontal,” he cracked. “It wasn’t something people signed on for.”

In five essay collections and five books of poetry, Lynch deals with the dramas, absurdities and mysteries of life’s back door. He wins over the most death-averse readers with his warm compassion, cool realism and sandpapery wit.

“As far as I know, the numbers are still hovering around 100 percent of people that are born dying,” he said. “I’m always glad to hear of any exceptions, but I still haven’t heard any credible ones.” (Yes, Lynch is a lapsed Catholic.)

These days, he is spending less time in Milford, where his son, Michael, has taken over the family business.

“He tells me, ‘You’re not retired but you’re not required,’” Lynch said. “It’s like grace — abundant and undeserved.”

He spends most of his time alone with his dog, Carl, at his home up north, near Indian River, on the south end of Mullett Lake. There, if an idea for an essay or another project strikes him, he can “pull the string all the way.”

“It’s a great gift, and my family has given me that,” he said.

A few of Lynch’s nine siblings live on the other side of the lake. When he spots nieces, nephews, sisters and brothers approaching on a canoe, he can choose to welcome the “free entertainment” or hide out.

Semi-retirement gives Lynch time to chip away at four different literary projects, including a novel and a new poetry collection, and to immerse himself in the poetry he loves.

Reading poetry is not a casual encounter for Lynch.

“There are people who say sex is just sex,” he said. “Well, not if you’ve had some. It’s the same with poetry. If you see it done right, you understand immediately that this is big medicine.”

On the same night the mouse cheated death at his house, Lynch read a new poem by Stephen Dunne, “A Post-Mortem Guide for my Eulogist,” from Dunne’s latest collection, “Pagan Virtues.”

At first, Lynch was a bit miffed that Dunne was treading on his turf, but he was “blown away” by the poem.

“I’ll be reading it for the rest of the month, to get the different angles and the different insights that are in it,” he said.

Lynch’s own 2019 collection of essays, “The Depositions,” brings together some of his greatest hits, including “The Undertaking,” with new writings.

A new essay, “Moveable and Steadfast Feasts,” describes the “bone rosary” Lynch made for his sick dog, Bill W., out of a string of lights and a cache of bones the dog had buried in the yard over the years.

Lynch did the digging for Bill W.’s grave in late fall, while the ground was soft, anticipating his demise over the winter, but the essay ended with Bill W. still alive.

Lynch was happy to give an update last week. “Bill W. is dead as a doornail,” he said. “I buried him like a pharaoh. We get over these things, as we do, and I bought another dog just like him. His name is Carl. He’s still around, and it’s sort of a race to see who makes it longer, Carl or me.”

Carl the dog is named after a frog.

“There were two frogs that lived in the pond up here where the well overflows,” Lynch explained. “One of them was Lenny and the other one was Carl. My grandson really enjoyed seeing them. One springtime, only one frog showed up again. It was Lenny.”

Lynch named the dog after Carl, at his grandson’s suggestion. As the hoary cliché has it, life goes on — and that is both comforting and irritating.

“The fact that the sky won’t fall when we leave perturbs us,” Lynch said. “We like to think the end of us is the end of everything. It’s not. It’s just a day in the life for most people.”

An Afternoon With Thomas Lynch

$5-10

2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, March 15

UrbanBeat

1213 Turner St., Lansing

urbanbeatevents.com, (517) 331-8440

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