Thomas Lynch
Poet, Essayist, and Funeral Director
"Bearing our Burden Honorably- Hospice and Humanity"
December 12, 2003

I thought as it's a beautiful bright morning I'd start with a poem, and for those of you who don't, I imagine that most of you do frequent poetry reading, but for those of you who have adult children or teenagers, you can go home and tell them among other things you did is attend a poetry readings; this will make them fear you in a way they didn't yesterday.

This is a poem about a cat that I hate and a boy that I love. I should say, you know those calendars that you get every year with a new word for everyday and you're supposed to impress your friends with your command of the language, and you say imbroglio a dozen times before noon, and they say, my, he's enjoying the calendar this year. Well, my wife gives me one every year and I try to stay true to it. One March several years ago I came across this word, grimalkin, which you will recognize, many of you, as a Shakespearean word for a fat, old, lazy gray she-cat. And at the time I was inhabiting a home with a cat of just this description and could have left it at the word, but I am a poet, and we poet do poets. I also thought that perhaps putting all my violent rancor with regards to the cat into this poem, I might kill it, but it didn't work. So I should say in advance now that those who have cats and love them do so with my approval. It's not the feline in general that I dislike; it’s this cat in particular that I hated. I once wrote an enthusiastically unflattering poem about a former spouse, and at least one reviewer took it to mean he doesn't like women. It was just that one woman, and only for a little while you know. She got over it, so did I, as we do.

Grimalkin, you might ask yourself what this has to do with bearing our burdens honorably, about which more anon.
One of these days she will lie there and be dead
I'll take her out back in a garbage bag and bury her among my son's canaries
The ill-fated turtles, a pair of angelfish
The tragic and mannerly household pest that had the better sense to take their leaves before their welcomes or my patience had worn thin
For twelve long years I have suffered this damn cat
While Mike, my darling middle son himself twelve years this coming May has grown into the tender and quick-tempered man-child his breeding, blessed and cursed him to become
And only his affection keeps the cat alive
Though more than once I have threatened violence
The brick and burlap in the river recompense for mounds of fur balls littering the house, choking the vacuum cleaner, or what is worse
Shit in the closets, piss in the planters, mice that winter indoors safely as she sleeps
Curled about a table leg, vigilant as any knick knack and a partial puma
But, Mike of course is blind to all of it
The gray angora breed of arrogance
The sluttish roar of the way she disappears for days
Sexed desperate once or twice a year
Urgently ripping her way out the screen door,
to have her way with anything that moves
While Mike sets up the tuna fish and worry
Crying out into the darkness, here kitty, kitty
Mindless of her whorish treacheries
Or of her crimes against upholstery
The sofas
Loveseats
Wingbats
Easy Chairs
She's puked and mauled into dilapidation
I have this reoccurring dream of driving her, deep into the desert
East of town
And dumping her out there with a few days feed and water
In the dream she is always found by kindly tribes people who eat her kind
On certain Holy Days as a form of penance
God knows I don't know what he sees in her
Sometimes he holds her like a child in his arms
Rubbing her undersides until she sounds like one of those battery-powered vibrators folks claim to use for the ache in their shoulders
And under Mike's protection she will fix her indolent, green-eyed gaze on me
As if to say
What are you gonna do about it slick?
The child loves me
And you love the child
Truth told
I really ought to have her fixed
In the old way with an airtight alibi, a bag of ready mix, and no eye witnesses
But
One of these days she will lie there and be dead
And choking back loud Alleluias
I will pretend bereavement for my Michael's sake
Letting him think, as he has often said, deep down inside you really love her
Don't you dad?
I'll even hold some cheerful obsequies
Careful to observe God's never failing care for even these
The least of his creatures
Making some mention of a cat
Heaven where a cat,
Ashes to ashes cat
and the Lord gives, and the Lord has taken away
Thus claiming my innocence to the end
I'll turn Mike homeward from that wicked little grave end
If he asks
We'll get another one
Because all boys need practice in the art of love
And all their aging fathers in the arts of rage

Now, I never say that to myself out loud without remarking to myself that the boy and the cat who figured prominently in the poem, said narrative, were both twelve when I wrote it, and the boy by God's grace turned 25 last may, and the cat lived to be 21. Oh yes, laugh, that makes it all better. I remember actually the details of the cat's demise, and I want to share them with you. It was actually ash Wednesday of 1999 when I with several of my co-religionists were getting that tribal smudge they put on your forehead to remind you of your mortality, like I needed that, you know that, what is it, remember man that you are dust, etc, etc. And I was casting about on the way home for maybe a cigar butt or something to put on the cat's forehead to remind it of its mortality when I got home. Failing that, I had simply e-mailed my son at school that he had left the cat, his laundry, his bills and everything with us. He had gone away to a nice state university. I said to him, "Michael, when you come home for Easter this year you will find great changes in Greta the cat. You will find that her toilet habits have become unpredictable. There are lumps all around her body, I knew them to be bad grooming but I wanted him to think the worst. Her appetite has changed; she won’t eat when we put it in front of her, she whines when there's none there. She roars to go out and wont go out when we hold the door, she roars to come in and won't come in when we open it. She has gone contrary in every possible way, and by this time was 21 years old." I said, "Mike, when you come home for Easter this year you're going to have to be prepared to do the right thing."

You know, and at the same time I was making these preliminary phone calls to Dr. Clark, our local veterinary surgeon, the man I have to thank for the cat's longevity. And I was saying things like, "Doctor Clark, we'll be in one Saturday before Easter, we'll think of it as Holy Saturday this year, and we'll want you to be prepared to do the right thing."
And Doctor Clark knew exactly what we were talking about. I remember the day that we had an 11o'clock funeral from which I rushed home with that big black sedan that we funeral directors double mortgage our business to drive around to impress our friends with. And I picked up Mike who brought out the cat swaddled in a little quilt, and we went down to Doctor Clark's office. It was a windowless room with sort of earth-toned wall coverings and some Enya music piped in from a source I could not make out. It was just the five of us, if you count that cat; it was Doctor Clark, his rather comely assistant, Michael, Greta and myself. And the conversation was going in exactly the direction I wanted it to go in. Doctor Clark was saying things like "Michael; you've been such a good friend to Greta these many, many years. Now it's time for you to make the difficult decisions of her end of life care." And Mike was nodding, I was nodding, and the cat was nodding. I thought we were all pretty much in agreement about all of this. Everything was going perfectly until this thing that I could never have predicted, happened. There was this one droplet of water making its way out my son's right eyeball and working its way South on his cheek. And, he wasn't shaking or sobbing; there was no redness in his face. There was nothing about his aspect that was disturbing except this one, you'd call it a tear I suppose, going South on his cheek and I could see that the comely assistant saw it because there was this panicked eye contact between herself and Doctor Clark, and suddenly the conversation took this unfortunate turn in the direction of: "Perhaps some Cortisone, Michael, would give her some comfort on these her final months." Months?, I said to myself, I've come for a dead cat today. I had zero-balanced my credit card; I had spent the frequent flyer miles that the sad event would occasion. I had even gone to the trouble of arranging, as we do, for a small box for the occasion. It was home, in the garage, awaiting the sad return of the pilgrims. I had even had one of our phantoms at the funeral home, another calendar word, arranged for a tastefully engraved berry granite stone to which Greta 1978-1999, Gone. And it was there with a box, in the garage, awaiting.

And they came in with this syringe of vile colored liquid, shot the cat in her hindquarters, and she went very still. And after just a few minutes, Doctor Clark said, you can take her home now Michael. And I thought, of course, he wants her to be home among people who know her for the good death, you know. So we did, we gathered her up and took her home, and for two hours she didn't move. And two hours after that she began to rattle some, and I thought aah, she's going now, she won’t see the weekend. But two days later she was up. Two weeks after that she was moving about. Two months later there was a certain bounce on her limp and she was looking at me as though I've shown you again. Of course she had. You know, I'm a member of a twelve-step group. I let go, I let God, I was walking the walk. I was trying to do the right thing. And I gathered them together, it was actually this time of year, it was thanksgiving time for another interview in my office. And I said to Michael, I can take a joke as well as the next guy. But here's the thing, I'm not the kind of guy to make a liar out of stones. You remember that thing about 78-1999 out in the garage waiting, waiting. And I should say in advance that it wasn't the money involved, I mean, I get them on the cheap; I pay wholesale. It was the existential vexation that here was this cat, at the end of a century, at the end of a millennium. Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr. Mother Teresa, had only lived in one millennium and this cat was on the brink of living in two.

I could not stand the notion, so I told Michael, if God, whomever she is these days, or nature, whomever he is, doesn't do the right thing, I would on December 31, 1999 drop the stone on the cat and kill it dead. It would not see another millennium; it would not see another day. You know, he took me seriously. He came home, I remember it clearly, on the seventh of December and went out in the back yard and in the area of where my delphinium used to prosper he dug a whole, and then he disappeared, and came back the next day. Now I should have known that something was up then because friends of their youth were gathering around in our house. His brother was home from the West side of Michigan where he is a fishing guide, without his dirty laundry. My daughter was home from Chicago where she is at Du Paul University and she didn't have a proposal or didn't need a co-sign. Everybody seemed to be showing up for no apparent reason, and my wife had laid in some finger food, and potables, and sure enough, Mike disappeared around five o'clock with the cat. Then came back about fort minutes later with it wrapped up in that blanket, dead. And he said to me, Do you have that box? And I said, I do, and I put it up on the picnic table and he put the cat in the box and wrapped it in this little blanket. And you know, for most of an hour people stood around and talked about that cat as if they really liked her. Saying nice things about her, recalling her 21 years among us. Just about before the Merlot ran out, Mike went over and, bend down, and kissed the cat, and put the top on the box and began a slow walk to the garden where he had prepared what you know call a grave, the day before. I walked with him, and he said to me this thing that I'll never forget: In as much as my heaven would be incomplete without Greta, doesn't that mean that Greta's there now? I said, I don't know Michael. He said, Oughtn't we to pray? And I said, pray away. And he said grace before meals, now I lay me down to sleep, some of his childhood rituals. But, there was this aspect about him that was really sacred. And then he got to the grave, and bent down, and he stood up and said I want to thank you for being here, but this part I have to do alone. I went back into the house and watched as he filled in a little grave, and he stole some more stones from my garden, made a little border. He went in, got the stone that I had caught and he put it there. And I thought, how very, very proud of him I am. How very pleased indeed, that without any particular tuition, without any particular instruction on my part, this man at twenty-something had learned that it's not about what we spend, or what we don't spend. it's not about how much we buy, or how much we save. When someone or something that we love dies, it's about what we do.

Ours is a species, it turns out, that deals with death. The idea of the thing by dealing with the dead, the thing itself. And Michael had learned in this important relationship that he had to do these things, he had to take, he had to process from the good death through his good grief, to a good leave taking. If it weren't for that we'd call it a funeral. I of course took it as a sign for superior parenting, a thing any of us would have done and I was not disabused of that illusion for most of ten months when for my birthday that year Michael conspired with his brothers and sister to get me a small kitten. Yes, laugh now. It was one of those stripy little thing. They were calling it Amy, and I was calling it bruiser. I left it out in the garage where I believe cats belong, but I had a bail of hay out there to warm it. I was getting up early in the morning, this is my custom, with increasingly expensive cans of designer cat food, taking it out there and having one of those mindless conversations we have with our beloved things. I was saying things like, when I was your age bruiser, or, you should have met Greta, she was a cat. Things were really going well, I was repairing my feelings about cats in general. My youngest son, a musician, who keeps exactly the opposite schedule as mine, was going out there to do the evening feeding. I think he was becoming very attached. He was calling it his cat, his cat Amy. I thought no bad thing for a young man to have an attachment to a cat. And things were going real well for about three weeks until my son the fishing guide from the west side of the state came to visit me, his only companion at the time at the time was a kind odd wolfish dog, a Malamute or something with strange eyes, sort of a gamy temperament. And probably because the trip was so long, the dog jumped out of the truck, making its way along the garage after the long trip, and the kitten, no doubt, thinking I was home hearing the car door slam, came out of the garage and was working its way across purposes towards the dog. Imagine the worst case scenario, and then double it because it was midnight when Sean was banging at the door saying, Dad, Mary come quick. Tommy's dog is eating my cat. Double it again because of the way nature works so quickly and efficiently the dog breaks the neck quickly, there's no malice it's just nature. The blood splatters on the white wall of the garage. I never understood doctor William's poem about the red wheel barrel, how much depends upon it, until I saw those little droplets of red on the white wall of the garage, and then I got it. Double it again because there I am at midnight in the backyard, with a hole in the garden and another box, and another dead cat, and another son saying, why wasn't God watching? What happened here? And I thought, doesn't God through knuckle balls after all, that here was a cat that I hated for twenty-one years and could not kill, whilst here was another that I liked for twenty-one days and could not keep alive.

Why wasn't God watching? What's going on here? Who's in charge? And it occurred to me then, and it occurs to me now, that the reason I like being a parent is for just such occasions. The reason I like being a funeral direction is for just such occasions. The reason I like being a writer is for just such occasions when there are no easy answers, when there are no bottom lines, or bible verse, or certain math where everything adds up. It is, as they say, a mystery. It's the reason I like being among people who work with hospice, who work with the dying, and the heart sore, and the bereave, because for some reason there are people who actually are good at playing in the deep end of the pool without floaties, without life preservers, without any particular certainty they offer up first and foremost their humanity. They are there, they make a gift of their presence, they show up. I have noticed this about hospice workers, I have noticed it about the clergy, I have noticed it about social workers, and I have noticed it about funeral directors.

Everyone wants to do our job, everybody has a better cure, everybody has another treatment, everybody has a different medicine, everybody has the one true answer, the way to the truth. In my line of work everybody with a briefcase, a modem and a wholesale book of caskets wants to be a funeral director. But I've noticed this, when someone dies in Milford Michigan, they don't call the banker, they don't call the insurance company, they don't call the newspaper; they call their hospice, they call their funeral director, and they call their clergy. And I tell you this, there is no lineup of cars going out in the middle of the night to the house where a death has occurred. There is one, or two, or three. And those people play in the deep end of the pool, who walk into the room, and embolden the living to take care of their dead, are for me local heroes, they are the ones who do it. I'm always glad to be around them. There is this perfect chemistry, this language that people get who understand these things. The priest in my town used to say to me; Tom, why do they always call you first? And I say, I answer the phone, that's all you have to do. Anyone who answers the call at two in the morning when someone dies is a hero, gets to have an opinion, is worthy of listening too, but it's a small crowd and it usually involves someone from the hospice, someone from the funeral home, and sometimes someone from their church. And they are heroes.

A man that I work with named Wesley Rice, once spent all of one day and all night carefully piecing together the parts of a girls cranium. she'd been murdered with a madman with a baseball bat after he had abducted her and raped her. The morning of the day it all happened she left for school dressed for picture day, a school girl dressed to the nine's waving at her mother ready for the photographers. She was abducted from the bus stop and found a day later in a stand of trees just off the word a town just south of here. After he raped her, and strangled her, and stabbed her, he beat her head with a baseball bat which he found beside the child's body. The details were reported dispassionately in the local media along with the speculation as to which of the wounds was the fatal one: the choking, the knife or the baseball bat. Of course these speculations were the focus of the double post mortem the medical examiner performed on her body before signing her death certificate; multiple injuries. Most embalmers faced with what Wesley Rice was faced with after he'd opened the pouch from the morgue would have simply said, closed casket, treated the remains enough to control the odor, zipped the pouch and gone home for cocktails. It would have been easier. The pay was the same, instead he started working. Eighteen hours later the girl's mother who had pleaded to see her, saw her. She was dead to be sure and badly damaged, but her face was her's again, not the madman's version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but he had retrieved her death from the one who had killed her. He had closed her eyes and mouth, he had washed her wounds, sutured her lacerations, pieced her beaten skull together, stitched the incision from the autopsy, cleaned the dirt from under her fingernails, scrubbed the finger print ink from her fingertips, washed her hair, dressed her in jeans and a blue turtle neck and laid her in a casket beside which her mother stood for two days and sobbed as in something had been pulled from her by force. It was the same when her pastor stood by her and told her God weeps with you. And the same when they buried the body in the ground. It was then, and always will be, awful, horrible, unappeasably sad. But the outrage, the horror, the heartbreak belonged not to the murderer, or to the media or to the morgue, each of which had staked their claim to it. It belonged to the girl and to the mother. Wesley had given them the body back.

Barbaric is what some people call this fussing over a dead human body. I say the monster with the baseball bat was barbaric. What Wesley Rice did was a kindness, and to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see than the ones that we imagine, or hear about in papers, or here of in the evening news. It was what we undertakers call, a good funeral; it served the living by taking care of the dead. A good funeral.

Ever since I was old enough to think about these things, these little oxymoron, a good death, which is something that the hospice people had been telling us for thirty years we could have. Good grief, which sounds like an oxymoron, and good funerals which sounds an improbable thing. The idea has always interested me, how do we arrive at it. And the times that I've spent with people on the brink of dying, what I have found about the good death is that it is the one surrounded by real care more than intensive care. The humans want to get home to do it, wherever they are, they want to get home. And even if home is a place where they are not surrounded by machinery, but surrounded by touch, that's a gift, that's a real gift. What the hospice has done in our generation, what the notion of hospice has done, and the actual experience of hospice has done, is to embolden an entire generation to deal with dying, to deal with human mortality by dealing with the dying. They embolden families to take care of their own with a little help from some of their friends, with a little help from their fellow professionals. But at the root of it is to say, you can do this. And I've never known of a family who when emboldened by someone from hospice doesn’t take out that path, and do it willingly, and lovingly, and thank the hospice people for emboldening them that way.