This story about Thomas Lynch just reminded me of the debated subject of the unknown martyrs' Burial in Tehran universities.Maybe it can shed light on the psychiatric aspect of the matter.Of course if we don't follow the decent policy of making a melancholic poet out of all students !
Born to a family who ran a funeral home in small-town Michigan, the poet Thomas Lynch began pondering aging and death at a young age, as a child leafing through the gory pages of his father’s mortician texts.
“A lot of 15-year-olds think they’re going to live forever,” he said. “But when I was 15, I sort of knew I wasn’t, because I spent a lot of time at the funeral home.”
Mr. Lynch eventually joined his father’s funeral business, and now two of his sons run it. Mr. Lynch, in his early 60s, still helps out. The day we spoke, he had spent the morning on a long drive north to pick up a friend who’d died. Mr. Lynch loaded the familiar body onto the stretcher himself.
“Making the drive, bringing him home, was good duty,” he said. “Having something to do is a blessing.”
A National Book Award finalist, for “Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade,” and the subject of a 2007 “Frontline” documentary, Mr. Lynch has just published his fourth collection of poems, “Walking Papers.” It is a pilgrimage of sorts through growing old and facing death — subjects that caregivers know all too well. His upfront, unvarnished style is likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life’s most important questions.
In the book’s title poem, Mr. Lynch advises an ailing friend to put aside his lab reports and explore a different type of medicine:
I say clean your plate and say your prayers,
go out for a long walk after supper
and listen for the voice that sounds like you
talking to yourself, you know the one:
contrapuntal, measured to footfall, true
to your own metabolism. Listen –
inspiration, expiration, it’s all the same,
the sigh of creation and its ceasing -
whatever’s going to happen’s going to happen.
Mr. Lynch addresses the impermanence of life, evident in everything from farm animals to his own aging body, which he imagines dead in his bed, “a little purple on the side I sleep on.” He reminds readers that enduring death requires simply being present and handling the tasks before us: baking casseroles, writing obits, digging graves.
Mr. Lynch insists that the prospect of his own death still scares him. Yet, he told me, “Mortality as a condition is one that I don’t think we should rail too much against. Living as if you’re going to be dead sometime is more sensible than living as if you’ll live forever.”
As a child, Mr. Lynch recalls, he was regularly called out of school to help out during memorial services. The constant parades of pallbearers taught him that funerals have less to do with the dead, more to do with what the living do about the fact that loved ones have died.
Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another, Mr. Lynch believes. “If we want to avoid our grief,” he said, “we simply avoid each other.”
Mr. Lynch writes that we’re “born with our last breath in us.” “Walking Papers” brings us up against this fact and, through the simple rhythms of small town life, tells us that’s O.K.
@nytimes
by : Mary Plummer
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