Do you like Lynch, ColdChef? I like his books pretty well, but, as with lots of people who write about their jobs, I wonder what somebody in that line of work might think.

I've read his books of essays, "Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality" and "The Undertaking" and loved both of them, but I haven't had a chance to read any of his poetry yet. He's an excellent spokesperson for our industry.

Here's a poem he wrote in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:
Local Hero

Some days the worst that can happen happens.
The sky falls or weather overwhelms or
The world as we have come to know it turns
Towards the eventual apocalypse
Long prefigured in all the holy books --
The end times of floods and conflagrations
That bring us to the edge of our oblivions.
Still, maybe this is not the end at all,
Nor even the beginning of the end.
Rather, one more in a long list of sorrows,
To be added to the ones thus far endured,
Through what we have come to call our history:
Another in that bitter litany
That we will, if we survive it, have survived.
Lord, send us in our peril, local heroes,
Someone to listen, someone to watch,
Some one to search and wait and keep the careful count
Of the dead and missing, the dead and gone
But not forgotten. Sometimes all that can be done
Is to salvage one sadness from the mass of sadnesses,
To bear one body home, to lay the dead out
Among their people, organize the flowers
And casseroles, write the obits, meet the mourners at the door,
Drive the dark procession down through town
Toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre.
It's what we do. The daylong news is dire --
Full of true believers and politicos
Old talk of race and blame and photo ops.
But here brave men and women pick the pieces up.
They serve the living tending to the dead.
They bring them home, the missing and adrift,
They give them back to let them go again.
Like politics, all funerals are local.

I love Thomas Lynch. Love.

Frontline is teh awesome. That is awl.

Cold Chef, that was amazing. Loved the program in so many ways.

For what it's worth, this is the email I sent FRONTLINE this morning:


I am a third-generation funeral director in rural Louisiana. My
brothers and sisters are all also funeral directors. My mother and
father, my uncle, my cousins, and my grandfather have all served as
funeral directors. Thank you for this beautiful program showing the
love and compassion that go into this profession.

The Lynch family serves their families with dignity and honor, and
provide the most delicate care to those in the darkest times of their
lives. Their firm is a credit to our vocation.

The most important message conveyed in this program is that funerals
serve the living. Again and again, throughout the program, the
families remark that the ceremonies they chose provided them with the
much needed closure they required. At our core, we are a society of
rituals and customs. These rituals sustain us when we don't know where
else to turn. Every family must choose for themselves how they honor
the lives of those they love. A decent and honorable funeral director,
like the ones highlighted in this program, asks the family what they
require and then facilitates it for them, with mercy and grace. In our
time of grief, funeral directors set us upon the road to recovery.
They gently guide us towards a place of acceptance and peace.