The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch Read Free Book Online Page A

their teens, overseen by a maiden aunt who traded her talents for childcare and housekeeping for her place in the household. The smitten young people would sit on a “love seat”—largeenough to look into each other’s eyes and hold hands, small enough to prevent them getting horizontal. The aunt would appear at strategic intervals to ask about lemonade, teas, room temperatures, the young man’s family. Decorum was maintained. The children married, often in the same room—the room with large pocket doors drawn for privacy and access. The room in which grandparents were waked and newbabies were baptized and love was proffered and contracted—the parlor.
    Half a century, two world wars, and the New Deal later, homes got smaller and garages got bigger as we moved these big events out of the house. The emphasis shifted from stability to mobility. The architecture of the family and the homes they lived in changed forever by invention and intervention and by the niggling sensethat such things didn’t belong in the house. At the same time, the birthing room became the downstairs “bath”—emphasis upon the cleanly function of indoor plumbing. Births were managed in the sparkling wards of hospitals, or for real romance, on the way, in cars. A common fiction had some hapless civil servant or taxi manbirthing a baby in the backseat of a squad car or Buick. The same backseat,it was often assumed, where the baby was invented—sparking and spooning under the supervision of Aunt Cecilia having given way to “parking” under the patrol of Officer Mahoney. Like most important things, courtship was done en route, in transit, on the lam, in a car. Retirees were deported to Sun City. Elders grew aged and sickly not upstairs in their own beds, but in a series of institutionalvenues: rest homes, nursing homes, hospital wards, sanitoria. Which is where they died: the chance, in 1960, of dying in your own bed: less than one in ten.
    And having lived their lives and died their deaths outside the home, they were taken to be laid out, not in the family parlor but to the funeral parlor, where the building was outfitted to look like the family parlors gone forever, busy withoverstuffed furniture, fern stands, knickknacks, draperies, and the dead.
    This is how my business came to be.
    Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out. And if the family that prayed together stayed together in accordance with the churchy bromide, the one that shitstogether rarely sticks together.
    We have no parlors anymore, no hearthsides. We have, rather, our family rooms in which light flickers from the widescreen multichannel TV on which we watch reruns of a life we are not familiar with. Kitchens are not cooked in, dining rooms go dusty. Living rooms are a kind of mausolea reserved for “company” that seldom comes. Lovemaking is done on those “getaway”weekends at the Hyatt or the Holidome. New homes are built with fewer bedrooms and more full baths. (Note how a half bath is not called a whole crapper.) And everyone has their “personal space,” their privacy. The babies are in daycare, the elders are in Arizona or Florida or a nursing home with people their own age, andmom and dad are busting ass to pay for their “dream house” or the remodeled“master suite” where nothing much happens anymore of any consequence.
    T his is also why the funerals held in my funeral parlor lack an essential manifest—the connection of the baby born to the marriage made to the deaths we grieve in the life of a family. I have no weddings or baptisms in the funeral home and the folks that pay me have maybe lost sight of the obvious connections between thelife and the death of us. And how the rituals by which we mark the things that only happen to us once, birth and death, or maybe twice in the case of marriage, carry the same emotional mail—a