Milford Undertaker Profiled on Frontline
Milford undertaker Thomas Lynch is a poet, a writer, and now the star of the Frontline documentary "The Undertaking"
"The Undertaking" by Frontline on PBS
by Vincent Duffy
10-30-07
Thomas Lynch is a writer, a poet, and an undertaker in Milford, Michigan. Tonight, public television audiences will have the chance to see how Lynch deals with death each day in the Frontline documentary "The Undertaking."
"Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople. Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned. I am the only undertaker in this town, I have a corner on the market."
That's Thomas Lynch in the opening of a Frontline documentary. It follows him behind the scenes of his undertaking business, from making the funeral arrangements to the embalming room. Lynch let the cameras in because there's a great curiosity about what he does.
"When someone calls you in the middle of the night to report a death in the family, it is the deep end of the pool you're answering from," says Lynch. "So, the idea that this is just another day selling solar heat windows, is not the case. These are existential experiences. This is, in many ways, this is when our faith, our family ties, our sense of community, when these things are really pressed, right up against the windows of our being, you know, to see, what is it all about now?"
Lynch says baby boomers want to talk about death and grief and funerals. They're dealing with their own mortality and the death of their parents. He says many people have lived their entire lives without coming into contact with the dead, especially now that the deceased are sometimes missing even from their own funerals.
"I mean we would not go to a baptism without the baby there or to a wedding without the bride there but we're constantly trying to do funerals without the dead guy there. And we come away from that experience saying to ourselves, 'Was something missing?' Something is. It's the body."
Lynch believes that the rituals of a funeral are more than mere formalities. He says funerals are the way we close the gap between a death that happens, and a death that matters. And for the death to matter, there are some essentials every funeral needs…
The one who dies. The people to whom it seems to matter. Someone who stands between the living and the dead, and this is cross cultural, some shaman, or priest, or pastor, or rabbi, or imam or some crazy person who says something like, "Behold, I show you a mystery," or words to that effect. And then we have to get, we have to get our dead disposed of. We need a hole in the ground, a fire, we need some sacred space, some oblivion, to which we consign our dead.
It's that type of philosophical outlook in Lynch's conversation and writing that drew Frontline producer Karen 'OConner to him as a documentary subject.
"I think certainly his insights about what he does…he's a gifted writer so I think he can take and shape that experience into amazing narratives or poetry, "O'Conner said.
"Yesterday I buried the oldest farmer in Milford township, he was 95," said Lynch, "He farmed land that his great, great grandfather settled. But when his funeral procession from the Methodist church passed through an honor guard of old tractors, I thought "this suits the man." Some people probably would have seen it as strange that friends of his were trailoring tractors from all over town, out of old garages, trying to get them running on the day, that's probably fairly strange but on the day it seemed just the right thing."
For Lynch and his family, the funeral business has always been more than just caring for the dead. Lynch says we need to remember that the dead matter, and for him, death is more than a business.
"It makes me wonder, and it makes me doubt, and it fills me with faith. I think these are all articles of the same…you know…faith."
The Frontline documentary "The Undertaking" will air on most public television stations tonight, at 10:00 pm.
