The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch Read Free Book Online Page B

message of loss and gain, love and grief, things changed utterly.
    And just as bringing the crapper indoors has made feces an embarrassment, pushing the dead and dying out has made death one. Often I am askedto deal with the late uncle in the same way that Don Paterson and I were about to ask Armitage Shanks to deal with the bad curry—out of sight out of mind. Make it go away, disappear. Push the button, pull the chain, get on with life. The trouble is, of course, that life, as any fifteen-year-old can tell you, is full of shit and has but one death. And to ignore our excrement might be good form,while to ignore our mortality creates an “imbalance,” a kind of spiritual irregularity, psychic impaction, a bunging up of our humanity, a denial of our very nature.
    W hen Nora Lynch got sick they called. The doctor at the hospital in Ennis mentioned weeks, a month at most, there might be pain. I landed in Shannon on Ash Wednesday morning and on the way to the hospital stopped at the Cathedralin Ennis where school children and townies were getting their ashes before going off to their duties. The nurses at the hospitalsaid I was holier than any one of them—to have flown over and gotten the smudge on my forehead and it not 9 A.M. yet in West Clare. Nora was happy to see me. I asked her what she thought we ought to do. She said she wanted to go home to Moveen. I told her the doctorsall thought she was dying. “What harm …,” says she. “Aren’t we all?” She fixed her bright eyes on the spot in my forehead. I asked the doctors for a day to make arrangements for her homecoming—a visiting nurse from the county health office would make daily calls, the local medico would manage pain with morphine, I laid in some soups and porridges and ice creams, some adult diapers, a portable commode.
    The next day I drove back to Ennis to get her, buckled her into the front seat of the rental car, and made for the west along the same road I’d been driving toward her all those years since my first landing in Shannon—an hour from Ennis to Kilrush to Kilkee then five miles out the coast road to Moveen, the townland narrowing between the River Shannon’s mouth and North Atlantic, on the westernmostpeninsula of County Clare. It was the second day of Lent in Ireland, the green returning to the fields wracked by winter, the morning teetering between showers and sunlight. And all the way home on the road she sang, “The Cliffs of Moveen,” “The Rose of Tralee,” “The Boys of Kilmichael,” “Amazing Grace.”
    “Nora,” I said to her between verses, “no one would know you are dying to hear you singingnow.”
    “Whatever happens,” she said, “I’m going home.”
    S he was dead before Easter. Those last days spent by the fire in ever shortening audiences with neighbors and priests and Ann Murray, a neighbor woman I hired to “attend” her when I wasn’t there. Two powerful unmarried women, sixty years between them, talking farming and missed chances, unwilling to have their lives defined for them bymen. Or deaths.
    And I noticed how she stopped eating at all and wondered what the reason for that was.
    W hen I first was in Ireland, that winter and spring a quarter century ago, Nora and I bicycled down to the Regan’s farm in Donoughby. Mrs. Regan had had a heart attack. We were vaguely related. We’d have to go. The body was laid out in her bedroom, mass cards strewn at the foot of the bed.Candles were lit. Holy water shook. Women knelt in the room saying rosaries. Men stood out in the yard talking prices, weather, smoking cigarettes. A young Yank, I was consigned to the women. In the room where Mrs. Regan’s body was, despite the candles and the flowers and the February chill—a good thing in townlands where no embalming is done—there was the terrible odor of gastrointestinal distress.Beneath the fine linens, Mrs. Regan’s belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Between decades of the rosary,