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OXOXOXO The
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Mortician and poet Thomas Lynch’s short stories are more about living than dying, more about the survivors than those who have died. He successfully blends semi-morbid facts about his dubious profession with heartbreaking laments about young and old lives lost. Thankfully, his sometimes irreverent humor keeps the stories from being too depressing, but never degenerates into disrespect for the grieving. The twelve short stories mostly revolve around his family, his neighbors in small-town Michigan, and his friends. Sprinkled throughout the stories are explanations of the history of cemeteries; the difference between a coffin and a casket, including cost estimates from low-end cardboard to high-end marble; and the typical weight of post-cremation ashes, which is about 10 to 12 pounds. But the heart of the stories are Lynch’s insights - often laments - about how people deal with death. Especially wrenching to Lynch, the father of four, are the deaths of children: "Burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams." Lynch is also passionately eloquent about the deaths of the elderly. He equates a forgotten, dying relative stashed in a nursing home to someone being "buried alive," and laments that people today see death as a failure, or at the very least, an embarrassment. "We turn from the dying of the ones we love, as if their dying made them strange, abandoning them to the clean hands of trained professionals who regard the unfixable human conditions as a waste of precious and highly priced time." A reader may pick the book up out of morbid curiosity, but finish feeling challenged to think about life and death in new ways. Reviewed by Megan Flaherty |
