Between Two Urns: Undertaker Thomas Lynch
Alex Smith
On this week's podcast we discuss "Undertaking" with guest Thomas Lynch, who's an undertaker, poet, and author.
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A Geriatrics and Palliative Care Podcast for Every Healthcare Professional
Eric 00:01

Welcome to the GeriPal podcast. This is Eric Widera.

Alex 00:03

This is Alex Smith.

Eric 00:05

And Alex, we have a special episode today — Between Two Urns.

Alex 00:09

Between Two Urns. We have to give credit for who came up with this idea.

Alex 00:17

So who came up with this name?

Eric 00:19

Miguel Paniagua. Who? We heard from him that he was going to do an ACP session on between two earns, including a funeral director or mortician, to talk about it in a play on Between Two Ferns.

Alex 00:35

Yep. But we are not going to be like Zach Galifianakis in our interview with our esteemed guest today, Thomas Lynch, who is an undertaker and poet in Michigan. He is the author of six collections of poems and six books of essays, and he has a book of short stories and a novel forthcoming. I was honored to meet Thomas after he published his book the Undertaking Life Studies from the dismal trade in the late nineties. He was a guest of Guy Micco, who’s been on this podcast a few times, at UC Berkeley in the late nineties. Thomas, welcome to the GeriPal podcast.

Thomas 01:12

Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.

Eric 01:14

We talk a lot about what happens before people die. Sometimes. We’ve talked about what happens when people die. I’m excited to talk about what happens after people die. But before we get into that, we always do a song request. Thomas, did you have a song request for Alex?

Thomas 01:35

I would like to hear “Time” by Tom Waits. It’s a standard classic.

Eric 01:40

And, Thomas, why did you choose this song?

Thomas 01:43

Because I was once asked to write the last op ed of the century for the Times, the New York Times. And I gave it this title, talking about how we can get plenty more of everything but time. It was at the turn of the millennium, and they thought that was cute.

Eric 02:02

So it was like a eulogy for the century, sort of.

Thomas 02:08

Yes.

Eric 02:09

Okay.

Alex 02:09

I absolutely love this song. It’s so hard to do Tom Waits. So on this version, I probably won’t growl it out, but I might do it on the recorded version that everybody hears who is listening audio only.

Alex 02:22

(singing)

Eric 03:29

What a beautiful song.

Alex 03:32

I love Tom waits. He’s such a good lyricist. Such a unique voice. Great choice. Thank you so much, Thomas.

Thomas 03:38

You bet. Thank you.

Eric 03:40

Okay, Thomas, I’ve got to ask. Alex called you an undertaker. Are you an undertaker? A funeral director, a mortician? I don’t know the definitions of any of those.

Thomas 03:52

Well, I’m all of the above. A funeral director is what goes on our sign. Because we don’t want to be confused with wedding planners and usually people. They used to talk about the undertaker’s parlor. I always like the word undertaking. Because it has this meaning of a promise or a pledge that you pledge to follow through on. I think the agreement between, for example, the role I have in Milford, Michigan. And I’ve had since 1974 as the only funeral director in the town. Is that when trouble happens, when there’s someone dead, I.

You can call and we answer the phone. And this seems very basic, but try it with your insurance agent or your pastor, you know, or your banker at 03:00 in the morning. And try it with your funeral director. I think you’ll mostly get answering machines. But the funeral director tends to be the one that picks up, you know, in real time and answers. Because when there’s trouble, we sort of. We respond to that emergency. This emergent reality that someone we love has just died.

Eric 05:11

Yeah. And oftentimes unexpected. My mom died a couple months ago. Again, unexpected. And I gotta say, like, I’ve been doing hospice and palliative care for nearly two decades. And I had no idea exactly what happens or what to do or the process of it. What’s probably. Probably the most shocking thing for me is that my lack of knowledge about what happens after someone dies.

Thomas 05:43

There’s nothing that inoculates you or quite prepares you for the difference between being and ceasing to be, which is literally a breath. But the. The difference in status for the one who has died. And quite remarkably, for all those to whom that death matters. The change of status is very fast. And it begins to sink in over time. And that’s why they used to talk about and the bed of heaven to your mother and sleep and rest to you at night.

Because these are the things that wake us in the middle of the night, wondering if we did all we could, or the coulda, shoulda would is really mound up when a death occurs, you know, when we’re outside, outside the range of any correction, you know. So my mother died 35 years ago, and I still sometimes sort of catch. I have a catch in the breath when I see a picture of her in rude good health. And I think, oh, there was something she did besides getting cancer and dying, which requires such a focus, you know, cancer and terminal illness of any kind.

Or my daughter’s suicide, which was sudden and though not entirely unexpected, not entirely unpredictable. It was part of a disease process, in my understanding of it, in my experience of it, they died two different ways. But I must say that grief has a way of coming round and round and round again. You know, we like to put it into nice stages and talk about year of mourning or the month’s mind mass, or, you know, we have anniversaries that go on and on and on forever, you know, without is Don Hall’s word for being widowed. And I think that’s as good as it gets. We are without.

Eric 07:41

You know, another thing I found very interesting, having written papers about grief and thought a lot about it, but agree that there’s. There’s no such thing as, like, stages. But you feel all of these things after someone that you love dies, like it’s overwhelming, and numbness is part of it. But there was something about the rituals that accompanied death. So writing a eulogy or seeing that individual, we had an open casket, which was both very hard, but also, I would say, somewhat cathartic to actually do these rituals and participate in these rituals. And I wonder your thoughts about that.

Thomas 08:24

I’m always touched by the notion that particularly in our country, we speak about open casket funerals. You know, it’s a luxury to have a casket in most places if they come at all at the end. You know, in other places, in most rural communities, the dead are laid out in their own beds, which is very often where they died. So someone comes in, as they do in west Clare, shifts the body to another bed or to a stretcher or to the floor, remakes the bed with fresh linens, puts the body back in the bed. Props a prayer book under their chin to keep their mouth closed.

Pennies on the eyes to keep the lids closed. Holds the hand and wraps it with a rosary to keep them tight. They might put bottles under each arm to keep the arms in place so the hands stay together. And this laying out of the dead is done across the world in every culture, with or without caskets, the casket has little to do with it. But ever since 1963, when Jessica Mitford wrote the American Way of death, we somehow have confused the value of the wake and funeral and all that after death activity with the stuff instead of the substance. So we think of the boxes first. And that’s because Jessica Mitford wrote a wonderful book about the cost of boxes and the cost of flowers and all the sort of.

Eric 10:00

It’s crazy expensive. It is.

Thomas 10:03

It’s very pricey or not. It just depends. Yeah, it just depends.

Eric 10:09

There was a full range of caskets. It was shocked by some of the prices at the high end.

Thomas 10:13

Well, yeah, in this way it’s like other merchandise. I mean, I have, in, in our funeral home I have boxes from seventy nine dollars to seven thousand nine hundred dollars. None of them will get you into heaven or keep you out. They’re just boxes. But everybody wants to do or say or show something with their choice of boxes. Now, you can’t fix a broken relationship by putting it in this box or that box. The box is a box is a box. Cardboard costs less than mahogany. And this is true if you’re, you know, whatever you’re buying from heads of lettuce to automobiles. Some stuff costs less than others in the same category.

But that’s neither here nor there. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, it’s less about the boxes and more about the bodies. And ours is the first culture in which, you know, particularly in the past one or two generations, we’re the first culture that I’m aware of that has tried to do funerals without the dead guy. And possibly you’ve noticed this, everyone is welcome. The talk is uplifting. The finger food is good, the music is chosen for its uplifting in nature. The homiletics are professional, the clothes are well pressed and often rented, and everyone, everyone is welcome.

But the one who has died, they have been shuffled off, secreted off to the crematory where they are. And the operative word here is just cremated or just buried. Whereas in cultures that practice cremation properly, it’s a public event full of ceremony and ritual and expectation. Here it’s done as a form of disappearance. And so the, just means that we want to minimalize any bother that attends the death in the family. So I have heard for 60 years now, when I’m dead, Tom, just cremate me. Nobody’s ever said, when I’m dead, Tom, please burn my body. Because the fire seems like proper illumination of life’s gift. Or it’s warm and people can warm to it in an otherwise cold experience of death or purifies as they believe in India, you know, do people ever.

Eric 12:51

Actually attend the actual cremation?

Thomas 12:55

What a great question. I noticed the same thing, like, 40 years ago, and 40 years ago, most of our deaths ended in a burial, maybe 10% or 15% or 20%. As the decades went on from the 1960s were cremations, and no one went to the crematory. But I kept thinking to myself, if, you know, when my mother died, I wanted to go to the graveside. I wanted to see her body into the ground, and I wanted to have a shovel in hand to cover it. We did all those things, and a lot of people, no one, unless the weather’s terrible or some other calamity occurs, people go to the graveside because it’s an important place.

They go the distance with their dead, unless they burn them. And here’s why. We like the industrial efficiency and the cost efficiency of fire. We just don’t want to. We think of fire, though, in western thought, particularly as punitive or wasteful. When you’re in trouble with God, you go to hell, where you’re not freeze dried, you burn according to the orthodoxies. Or if we burn the trash, we bury the treasure. These kind of tropes inform the mindset that keeps people. If someone’s going to be cremated, that’s done in private.

Somebody like me goes to the retort. So for 50 years, I’ve been saying to families, you know, when we go to the crematory, we do it by appointment, just like when we go to the cemetery to bury. Why didn’t you come with us? Why don’t you help us lift the person into the retort, into the. It might have some use to you. Maybe you’d like to push the button. Maybe you’d like to say a prayer or read a poem or sing a song, or maybe you up on that offer. How many do you think do.

Eric 14:55

Well, I mean, it’s gonna go back to my own personal experience is that, like, I didn’t. I didn’t want to be there. Seeing my mom lowered in the grave, I am very happy is not the right word. It was incredibly important that I was there to be part of that process. It was incredibly hard, but it helped with kind of closure, finality of that experience. But if you just ask me what I would want. So I think the same thing here is that probably most people say no, but it may be helpful for them.

Thomas 15:30

I think it might be helpful. I can tell you this. I have never, ever had a family who I have encouraged to go to the crematory. I’ve never had one turn around after they’ve lifted the often boxed body into the retort with help from their nephew or cousin or granddaughter or whatever it might be. It’s a job that two people can usually do, and I’ve never had anybody turn and say, that was cruel, that you made me do this, or, I wish I didn’t come here. Invariably they say, thank you. That was important for me.

Eric 16:12

So how many people? Actually, I don’t know.

Thomas 16:13

I’m just going by the numbers. Less than 15% of the. Now, two thirds of the deaths that end in cremation. At least in most of this country, two thirds of the deaths end in cremation. I dare say where if you’re in San Francisco, it’s more like it’s more than two thirds, but of that, less than 15% actually go to the place where the fire is to take part in that. And it’s because we have negative ideas about fire. We have lovely ideas about cremation.

There’s a difference between the idea of the thing, as I think it was Wallace Stevens said, and the thing itself. The thing itself is a duty that I’ve always said. This is my sort of rule of thumb. A good funeral is one whereby getting the dead where they need to go, the living get where they need to be. It is by the proper and honorable conduct of those duties that the survivors of a death have to the dead to get them buried or burned, or blown out of a cannon, or up in a tree, or off to the sea, wherever, whatever the oblivion we choose for them, our job is to go the distance with them, to get them there.

And if we do our part, the lifting, the digging, the bearing, the witnessing, whatever our part seems to be, if we don’t farm it out to somebody else, if we just do our part, that gets us where we need to be, which is at the edge of a life we’re going to live without someone who is sort of primary to our life. So I say, if you burn your dead, go to the fire. If you bury your dead, find a hole in the ground. If you’re going to bury them at sea, take up an ore and make your way, but go the distance with your debt. And anything short of that, we’re just shorting ourselves. We’re literally not getting our money’s worth. We’re going to charge you whether you go or not. You may as well go and get your money’s worth.

Alex 18:28

Very powerful. Eric, I want to say thank you for sharing your story about your mother on the podcast, that was vulnerable, and I didn’t know that was going to happen. Thank you for I’m talking about that so openly and from Eric’s story, clearly and from your words just now, you talked about this pushback against cremation and the concern about fire. And I think there’s this other piece that we should acknowledge here, which is that it’s the disappearance of the body and the death itself, the viewing of the death that people may be trying intentionally to avoid, and that open casket funerals, or seeing the body laid out on the bed, as you described earlier, lowering the body into the grave.

Those rituals carry with them important symbolic meaning to the living who go on afterward as they come to terms with, and better come to terms with perhaps, the fact that this person has died, the reality of it. And so I see that tension in our culture. You know, we’ve talked about in this podcast, death denying culture, etcetera, and I wonder if that if, in your sense, that also plays into this movement towards crematoriums.

Thomas 19:50

I appreciate the question, and it’s a wise one. I think the first thing I want to do is just abuse any of your listeners from the notion that there’s anything other than useful, noble, efficient, and beautiful about cremation. Cremation is an ancient and honorable way of disposing of our dead, just like burial, just like taking them to a place where the scavenger birds will pick their bones clean and returning to get those bones and turn them into the icons that they are. So there’s nothing at all wrong with cremation. But in this culture, we haven’t learned to take full advantage of the honorable and beautiful and great functional way it is of disposing of our debt because we’ve confused its value with its cost.

We’ve said it costs less than Barrick, therefore it’s better. And it may be better. I mean, I’m only speaking from our own family experience, and we have buried some of our dead, we burned some of our dead. It just depends on the family preference on the individuals involved. But I have to say, if cremation is done properly and for the right motivations, it’s beautiful, and it’s powerful in terms of its symbolic and metaphoric value to the living. But when I speak about the proper motivations, I just don’t think saving a third on the cemetery expenses is a proper motivation. Now, I understand that money matters.

I raised four children, and I know that everything costs too much whenever it costs anything. So I get that part. But my job is not to tell you what to spend on a funeral. I think part of my undertaking is to tell you how to get value out of whatever it is you’re going to do. And so whether you use a cardboard box or a box made of african mahogany or american cherry, it doesn’t matter to me. A box is a box is a box. And by the way, I make a buck on the $79 cardboard, too. And I better, because if I don’t, I close the door, and no one answers the phone at 03:00 in the morning in Milford anymore. So I think most of the people in my town. I mean, if I become a real. If I take advantage of people in their grief, that gets around pretty quick.

That’s bad for business. So I behave properly, because it’s good business to behave properly. And my son now has the business. And with any luck, he’ll leave the business to someone he’s related to or he cares about or trusts. So maintaining the reputation of the name on the sign and the enterprise itself is very important to funeral directors.

Eric 22:51

So that’s kind of like the antidote to the upsell is the.

Thomas 22:56

Well, you know, confusing. A call for help, which is basically a call for service. The sales op, that’s clumsy, whether you’re getting your windshield repaired or there’s a death in the family. But I can tell you, it seems to me that anybody who tries to upsell, because I’m not opposed to anybody spending anything they want on a funeral. Jessica Mitford’s funeral. I have this from her family. I mean, you know, she was. Her funeral was in the Lyric theater in central London. I could bury 100 people in Milford, Michigan, for what it cost to rent that theater.

I promise you. But nobody said, oh, mom wouldn’t want us spending that kind of money. She was a great woman and a great writer, and she had the money. Why not spend it on this? What, you’d rather, you know, another car or a trip to the Bahamas? That’s what I hear. Oftentimes, dad wouldn’t want us spending this money. And then they go off on their world tour. While dad’s ashes remain in the closet of memories at the funeral home, somebody.

Alex 24:08

Just forgot to get them that importance of place. My dad died in the late nineties in Michigan, and he was cremated, and his ashes were put in two places, split and put in two places. One is at the local church that I grew up in, the unitarian universalist church in East Lansing, and the other half was in Hilo bay. Now, the church has since moved, and they said they moved the soil from the area where people’s ashes had been spread to the new church. However, I just don’t have a connection with that new church and Hilo Bay, wonderful place.

I was born in Hilo, but I moved away to Michigan when I was six months old. I don’t have a strong connection there either. I regret, and I’ve talked openly with my family about this, that there is no place that I feel I can go to to mourn my father in the same way that, say, my wife, whose dad also died several decades ago, has a gravesite nearby that she can go to and visit several times a year, think of her father, pay respects to her father that we can take our children to.

So there’s something about that place and that importance of place and choosing that place that, to me, is really important. I’ve told my wife, when I die, I don’t want to be cremated. I want to be put in a grave with a headstone in a place that you and the family can access so that you have an opportunity to be with me and invoke my memory at that place. I wonder if that rings true to your experience.

Thomas 25:44

It is exactly the case. And if you look at the increase, the steady increase since the 1960s till the present time of cremation in this culture, and cremation in this culture is only, what, 150 years old. I think the first cremation in the United States was in 1876 or thereabouts. So we haven’t been at cremation very long, and it’s normal to be a little clumsy at figuring out the. The rubrics and the traditions and the customs around it. But cremation is like our culture. We are all more portable, less grounded, more mobile, and more scattered than the cultures that came before us.

The 20th century is a culture that, unlike the century before it, where everybody died in the place they were born, that was not true. Everybody moved every ten years in the 20th century. And usually the move was not from this side of the county to that side of the county. It was from this side of the country to that side of the country. Big moves back and forth and depending on contingencies that we never reckoned on a century before. And we had the means to move and the money to move, and we had the imagination to move.

So cremation really works for many people. And the notion. The notion that it makes us divisible in the way you speak of your father’s ashes being divided so that places that were so dear to him or important to his history are marked by that. I also understand wanting to have a place that replicates the size and shape, for example, of my daughter’s body in the grave where we put her with a stone at the end of it. When I go there, and I don’t go that frequently because I live up north on a lake with the dog and. But when I get back to Milford, I go to my daughter’s grave, and I usually, you know, it’s.

I shake a fist in the face of whomever’s in charge here, you know, the woulda, coulda, shoulda’s. I wish I could have changed something about her narrative of life, but I can’t. Those things are not in our control. But the grave is a comfort. Knowing where to go is a comfort. But I do think in a culture that moves and is mobile and is scattered, cremation can be expected to increase at least up to 80 or 90%. And with the exception of, you know, generational farmers, few people will be buried.

Eric 28:30

I got another question, because it may just be where I live in Marin County. Alex, too. So San Francisco area, there’s a lot of talk about green burials, too. So Fernwood, right here in Mill Valley, you get no embalming fluid, no, like, stuff be put on a plot of land next to a tree. Is that a growing interest or is that just.

Thomas 28:53

Certainly the environmental. The attention to our environmental dilemmas is across the culture, whether it has to do with our mortality, our medicine, our money, everything has a component that has to do with the environment and the fix we’ve gotten ourselves into, whether we like it or not. So it’s not a surprise that even as corpses, we have to be good citizens of the environment. So green burial, I think, works very well. The thing about green burial is it emphasizes participation by the next of canon, the immediate family in the community.

So rather than having a backhoe spewing fumes from gasoline out of the top and digging trenches in the ground, what they say is, come and dig your shovels, help us bury the dead who are not embalmed, and they’re not going in vaults. My daughter wanted a green burial. The cemetery in which she’s buried requires like, a. Not a sealed vault, but a cement container to keep the ground from sinking. They don’t want the liability of people walking through the graveyard and tripping and falling and suing the township. So they say, use cement boxes when you bury. So my daughter is in a wicker basket. She was embalmed because she died the bed of heaven to her in Marin county, off that bridge where so many people find their release. You know, I think it was up until recently, up until the last five years, the most popular site for self destruction in the country. Mm hmm.

Popular is an odd word to use there, isn’t it? But what I know is that in her, in the desolation where she was at the end, she left her husband, got in a car, drove across country, turned left, didn’t make it over the bridge. Now, you know that there are bridges everywhere, and there are many times I cross a bridge and I think, I’m glad she didn’t jump from this bridge because I have to cross it all the time by the grace of whomever’s in charge here. I might never see the golden gate again. But for months after her death, I would wake in the middle of the night for the reason most men wake in the middle of the night. And on the way back to bed, I would almost. I could feel myself accelerating to the speed of gravity. At 32ft/second per second, bodies in motion will fall at unencumbered. And I just wanted to feel how my daughter felt, looking first into that oblivion.

And all I could think of, and I think all of us think this, whether it’s about your dead mother, the bed of heaven to her, or your dead father, the bed of heaven to him, or my dead daughter or my dead parents, or the. The 6300 Americans who will die today, and life will go on with and without them. Whatever happens, we try to imagine them. And in doing so, we’re imagining our own mortality, how we’ll feel about that. And I can’t imagine anyone working in an end of life situation, in hospital palliative care situations. We are nose to nose with the notion that we die, full stop. No adjectives, no adverbs. We die. That’s our species.

Eric 32:42

And yet I still felt unprepared.

Eric 32:48

And I’m guessing same thing with you and your daughter. There’s nothing that prepares you. And it’s very easy to try to protect yourself by trying not to think about it. Not wanting that open casket funeral or not wanting to see the body go down, not wanting to do the eulogy. All of those things, in my own experience, were so incredibly helpful because while I didn’t want to confront things, it made me confront the nature of life and death and what it all means and my relationship to my mom. I think that was, for me, the most important learning lesson about a funeral. It’s about, in some ways, the ritual of confrontation about the facts that are before you.

Thomas 33:41

We get stuck. And you can test this with your own experiences. I think the news of death puts us immediately in the middle of this imbroglio, where we’re drawn to doing nothing at all and we’re drawn, conversely, to doing everything we can and then some. Nothing’s going to change the fact that we die, but we think if we just don’t hear about it, say anything about it, talk about it, it’ll all go away. Or if we buy this, that, or the other thing, or go this distance, or try this thing, or I have this song, or if, you know. And we always have a list of people we should be mad at, right? Because somebody’s got to account for this. But most times, we end up somewhere in the middle. We have our little say.

We write the obituary, we do our first version of biography in a paid death notice, and we have our weeping and our laughing, and we have a cheese sandwich when it’s over and go home to the night. I mean, it’s just the way it works. And a year later, we say, I made it. We didn’t. We just did a day at a time, a day at a time and things. We somehow retrieved that huge emotional capital that we invested in. A mother, a father, a daughter. We get it back, and we might get back the nerve to reinvest it again.

Eric 35:14

Can I ask, as we often talk about the role that we do in the hospital as physicians, nurses, being around death and dying, what’s it like for an undertaker, a mortician, what kind of training do they get for their own kind of self care and dealing with death and dying? Yeah. And again, I’m going to ask you after this is how you also got interested in this as a career path, because that’s often a question asked of, like, for us in palliative care, hospice care, like, it’s a conversation stopper, somebody asks you what you do at a party, and usually it’s, oh, that sounds really hard. And then the. There’s nowhere to go with that conversation.

Thomas 36:01

But someone’s got to do it.

Eric 36:06

What type of training do morticians, undertakers get?

Thomas 36:10

They learn how to embalm. They’re taught how to embalm because, you know, that’s the technology that allows people the hours or days or, you know, it takes time out of the equation.

Eric 36:24

Yeah.

Thomas 36:25

Before. Before there was routine, effective embalming, someone died on a Tuesday, depended about the weather on Wednesday, when they were going.

Eric 36:35

To be buried, which was surprising, because I never thought about that is that like organizing like a catholic mass on a particular day? That takes time, and it kind of forces the hand for embalming. And embalming is it’s a. Wasn’t it civil war? That’s when civil war.

Thomas 36:51

That was the first time in this country’s history when people died away from home in big numbers and had to be prepared to be taken home. It would take time to get them home. And now, of course, it’s, you know, it’s giving time for everybody to get back home from the scattering around the country. That is true. Most families, you know, kind of flipped.

Eric 37:15

It on its head there a little bit.

Thomas 37:17

But time is still critical. And this is the difference between the so called celebration of life that happens when the weather’s good and everybody’s on vacation. It takes that sort of emergency. We got to do something now about this. And that’s how we’ve separated the disposition of the dead from the recollection of the dead. And I really do think the funeral with the body present, whether it’s regardless of the boxes, but the funeral that surrounds a death in the family, including the corpse, is the one that works because it has a job, and the job is within a proper amount of time to get the dead where they need to go, into the fire, into the ground, into the tomb, into the water, into the tree, into the sea, whatever you plan. And you do it in such a way, it feels like an emergency, so get on with it. But it still gives you time to order the cheesecake and the lunch net and that kind of stuff.

Eric 38:20

I also feel like it’s a role of a good mortician or undertaker or funeral director is you’re kind of. I won’t. Not an event planner, kind of a ritual planner, is that you’re the guide for the family, who often is dealing with this for the first time. And part of it saying, no, like, you don’t, you don’t have to rush this decision. You can take a little bit of time. We will work with these people like it is working them through the process of these rituals.

Thomas 38:50

When I was a kid, when I was 15 and 16 years old, my father would plunk me at the door of the funeral home and said, open the door for anybody that’s coming in and direct them where they need to go. It’s usually in this room or that. So I would open the door, and then when they were leaving, I would open the door and they’d go out at the end of maybe a twelve hour shift of doing that, trying to look really good. I had a nice suit. I looked like a budgie little kid who was told he was doing what he was told. At the end of, you know, one night, the widow of the man who was laid out in the room came out. She had all her get, all her visitors had gone.

Her family had gone on to open the house back up, and she came out with one of her children. And I held the door for her, and she grabbed me by the shoulders and looked up into my face and said, I couldn’t have done this without you. And that’s very seductive. When there was no talent involved, I was just opening the door and closing, carrying flowers from here to there, showing up and doing the next right thing and being accredited with having done a great job at something. Somebody needed you to get through it. It’s very seductive, and I’ve never gotten over that.

Eric 40:07

It’s why your path into it. Did you ever decide to do anything else?

Thomas 40:13

Well, if my father had been a used car dealer, maybe I’d have been selling Chevys, I don’t know. But he was a funeral director, and he was the most respected man I know, including, he had my respect. And I thought, I want to do something that makes me like that. And I must say, after 50 years in town, the reason I live alone on a lake with a dog is because if I was still in the house next to the funeral home where I lived for 30 some years, 40 some years, 50 some years, I couldn’t walk out the door without being on because the parking lot was full of neighbors. I buried every one of their families for years.

So you can’t walk out. And people say, oh, he’s retired. Don’t talk to them. So the only retirement I have, which gave me time to type and read and do the things that I want to finish doing before I shuffle off this moral coil, is to get out of town, you know, and that’s why I’m here. I read and I write and blather on the podcast.

Alex 41:17

I want to get back to something Eric mentioned earlier and a question. We get a lot in geriatrics and palliative care. Does it get to you, like, how can you do this?

Thomas 41:29

I think it gets to me in this sense. I think I go quicker to the worst case scenario. I have been with people on whom the sky has fallen. The worst that can happen has happened. Everything I do is an improvement, even if I don’t do anything. That’s the effort to, you know, the effort to show up makes them feel cared for. You know, but I do go in my own thinking and my own narratives of life and my own relationships with my children. I go to the worst case scenario. I really do, and I wish I didn’t.

Alex 42:10

I wonder, Eric, if we could have a poem before the song, the closing song. Would that be okay?

Eric 42:16

I would love that. Thomas, we’d love to hear one of your poems. We will have links to Thomas’s books, too, so if people are interested. And, Thomas, I also just want to thank you for being so very honest with us, too, and talking about your daughter and personal experiences.

Thomas 42:34

It’s like going to the shrink and not getting a bill. Thanks to the both of you. Anyway, this is a poem called walking papers, and it’s a kind of a correspondence to the first real poet, the first living poet I ever met. Michael Heffernan, who died on the 3 may. Yeah, I was just out in Arkansas for his funeral, and we were great friends. He was my writerly friend. He saw everything I wrote, sent me everything he wrote. This is called walking papers to Michael Heffernan. I reckoned reading frost would put you right and making something from a line of his a better way to use what’s left of time than trying to diagnose what’s killing you.

Something your doctor said about something he gathered from something in your latest labs, letting slip some quibble about blood work or enzymes or liver function. Listen, something’s going to get you in the end. The numbers are fairly convincing on this. Hovering as they do, around 100%. We die and more’s the pity. Same for the goose as for the gander. True for both saints and sinners, fit and fat. We get our dose of days, and after that we get whatever is or isn’t next. Heaven remembered. A kick in the ass. A place in a frame on some grandkids piano. A grave, a tomb. The fire. Our ashes scattered. The scavenging birds.

The deep. Nirvana. Sure, one oblivion’s good as another, by all accounts. There’s nothing to it, pal. A cakewalk kicked, bucket falling off the log. One moment you are, and the next you aren’t. The way that semicolon slipped in there before the comma, in the following line, three lines before the coming period. You can think of it as punctuation and maybe take some comfort from that friend. A question mark or exclamation point, no matter. We’re all sentenced to an end. It goes on from there, but it goes on too long. I’ll leave it there. And again, my thanks to both of.

Eric 45:00

You for your curiosities Thomas, I kind of just want to go over to your place right now and talk to you for another 5 hours. I really want to thank you for joining us today. This is both informative and I also felt like a therapeutic session for me. But before we end, Alex, do you want to give us a little bit more?

Alex 45:21

(singing)

Eric 46:29