Lynch - The undertaking : life studies from the dismal trade

T hanks are due to John Lanchester of The London Review of Books and Alexandra Ringe of Harpers for the early publication of several of the essays that appear in this collection. To Gordon Lish, who published my first poems and essays, I owe permanent thanks. As I do to Jill Bialosky at W. W. Norton whose trust in and efforts on behalf of this manuscript have brought it into being.

I shall always be in arrears in my indebtedness to Robin Robertson at Jonathan Cape, well met in Dublin in the Spring of 1989, who has edited my poems and who first suggested a book of this type over raw fish in London a few years ago.

Likewise, I am grateful to my agent, Richard P. McDonough, for his championship of this manuscript and his loyalty and friendship.

Thanks also to the men and women at Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors with whom I work. Their dedication and professionalism have afforded me the time to complete this book. Especial thanks are due to my brother Edward, whose duties have redoubled in my absences. He is, like the man he was named for, a true caregiver, a good and decent man. I am grateful, also, to my neighbors and friends in Highland Township and Milford, Michigan, for entrusting to our family, for nearly twenty-five years now, the care of their families in difficult times. By sharing with me the details of their lives and deaths, they have made me aware of just how precious we are to one another. In the preparation of these essays, I have been keenly aware of the obligation to respect their privacy. Thus, some of the events and characters recorded here are composites, cominglingstruths renamed, reshaped, refaced, but finally told, in ways that protect the trust theyve given me.

For related reasons, I am ever in the debt of writers and friends, Irish, English, Scots, and Americans, who have let me write, sometimes fast and loose, about our friendships.

I am thankful to Pat Lynch, Mary Howell, Melissa Weisberg, Audrey Kowalski, and Fr. Matthew Lawrence, each of whom read and gave valuable commentary on this manuscript in its making.

To Karen OConnor of WGBH in Boston and the office of the Oakland County Medical Examiner, I am indebted for material mentioned in Uncle Eddie, Inc. Also, to Ron Willis, cemetery sexton and thinking man, I owe thanks for his willingness and ability to take the other side of any argument, without which my own would never approach clarity.

To my daughter, Heather Grace, and my sons Tom, Mike, and Sean, I am ever beholden for their patience, enduring, as they do, draft after draft of a work in progress.

No vocabulary of thanks and praise includes the words sufficient for what I owe to Mary Tata who has known this text from the very first.