The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch Read Free Book Online

forever the liberty of walking out into the night air or the morning mist with a full bowel or bladder and having at the landscape in ways that can only be called “close tonature.”
    T he thing about the new toilet is that it removes the evidence in such a hurry. The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has “civilized” us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish. No more the morning office of the chamber pot or outhouse, where sights and sounds and odors reminded us of the corruptibility of flesh. Since Crapper’s marvelous invention, we needonly pull the lever behind us and the evidence disappears, a kind of rapture that removes the nuisance. This dynamic is what the sociologist, Phillip Slater, called “The Toilet Assumption,” back in the seventies in a book called The Pursuit of Loneliness. He was right: having lost the regular necessity of dealing with unpleasantries, we have lost the ability to do so when the need arises. Andwe have lost the community well versed in these calamities. In short, when shit happens, we feel alone.
    It is the same with our dead. We are embarrassed by them in the way that we are embarrassed by a toilet that overflows the night that company comes. It is an emergency. We call the plumber.
    I sometimes think the only firms that put their names on what they do anymore are firms that maketoilets and direct funerals. In both cases there seems to be an effort to sound trustworthy, stable, established, honest. Twyford’s Adamant, Armitage Shanks, Moen & Moen, Kohler come to mind. Most other enterprises seem hidden behind some “assumed name” someone is “Doing Business As.” Drugstores and real estate agents have given up the surnames of their owners for the more dodgy corporate identitiesof BuyRite or PayLess or Real Estate One. Doctors and lawyers have followed, taking in their shingles and putting out neon with murky identities and corporate cover. Drygoods and greengrocers, furniture merchants, saloons and restaurants—all gone now to malls and marts and supermarkets with meaningless or fictional monikers. But funeral homes and water-closets still stubbornly proclaim the nameof the ones you’ll be doing business with. Lynch & Sons is the name of ours. Is it ego or identity crisis? I sometimes ask myself.
    The house I live in here on Liberty was built in 1880. It had no plumbing at first. It had a cistern in the cellar to collect rainwater and likely had a pump in the kitchen and an outhouse in the backyard surrounded by lilacs. Next to the kitchen was a birthing roomwhere agreeable women of that age had their babies. It was next to the kitchen because, as everyone knows, the having of babies and the boiling of water were gerundives forever linked in the common wisdom of the day. And after the babies were born and showed good signs of living (no sure thing then—more than half of the deaths in 1900 were children under twelve), they were christened, often ina room up front, the priest or parson standing between the aunts and uncles and grandparents that populated the households of that era, where everybody looked liked the Waltons with their John-Boys and Susans and goodnight Grampaws. These were big families, madelarge by the lovemaking of parents before the mercy of birth control turned families into Mommy and Daddy and 2.34 Johnnies and Suesand the modern welfare state turned households into Mommy and babies and a phantom man—like the “bull brought in a suitcase” to dairy cows in West Clare.
    The homes were large to house multiple births and generations. These were households in which, just as babies were being birthed, grandparents were aging upstairs with chicken soup and doctors’ home visits until, alas, they died and were takendownstairs to the same room the babies were christened in to get what was called then, “laid out.” Between the births and deaths were the courtships—sparkings and spoonings between boys and girls just barely out of