While a “good funeral” may sound like an oxymoron to many people, Thomas Lynch said he believes there are good funerals.

A funeral director in Milford, Mich., and the author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, Lynch spoke about his writing and funeral-izing on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 11, at the Irish American Heritage Center, 4626 N. Knox Ave., Chicago.

A good funeral isn’t only or entirely a religious event, and it isn’t only or entirely a social event, Lynch said. A good funeral can say something about this “unspeakable sadness,” he said. And good funerals “serve the living by caring for the dead,” said Lynch, who has been planning funerals for more than 30 years.

Wearing a dark shirt with a black suit and dress slacks, Lynch quipped that he was glad to be introduced in the present tense, and he also noted the cleanliness of the massive, elegant brick building, a former public school. “The air of Murphy’s oil penetrates,” he said.

Lynch’s personal essays—about his growing up, helping out in his family’s funeral home, being a funeral director, quitting drinking alcohol and trying to be a good father—also leave a lasting impression. Some funeral directors, in fact, like his work so much that they give his books as holiday presents to co-workers.

At a time when many family-owned funeral homes are being bought out and consolidated by bigger companies, Lynch shows through his writing the importance of running a funeral home on trust, personal attention and accountability.

As Lynch, who is an Irish Catholic, read some of his own poems and essays, his words seemed to flow in a rhythmic way, just as they do in his essays. He read one poem that he wrote about a cat he hated and a cat owner he loves. When Lynch wrote the poem, his son Michael and the cat were both 12.

“For 12 long years, I’ve suffered this damn cat,” Lynch read. He said the cat’s fur balls often clogged the vacuum, and he said he used to have a recurring dream in which he would take the cat to a desert, where she would have only two days worth of water and kitty litter.

Finally the cat died, and Michael dug a grave for it in the back garden, complete with a marker. Michael wrapped her in a blanket and placed her in a plastic bag, which he put in a box that he buried.

Lynch said that watching Michael bury the cat made him proud, for he saw that Michael had figured out the value in what funeral directors do.

While Lynch couldn’t kill the cat that he hated, a different cat that Lynch liked OK turned out to live for only about 21 days because a dog attacked it.

“We do not get answers in this world,” Lynch said. The best that we can hope for is a room where we can ask questions, he said.

A funeral parlor can be just that kind of place. “Go to a funeral home and you’ll hear the best conversations,” Lynch said. “Now we’re not talking about the weather.”

Lynch recalled a girl in the Midwest who was kidnapped at a bus stop, raped, strangled, and beaten in the head with a baseball bat. Since the girl’s head was found separated from the rest of her body, closing the casket would have been the easiest thing for a funeral director to do.

Instead, a funeral worker washed her hair, reassembled the broken parts of her skull and cleaned her many wounds. And then, when the woman’s mother visited, she wound up staying at the casket for about two days.

“It served the living by caring for the dead,” Lynch said.

Lynch wrote in Bodies in Motion and at Rest that he believes the living should be the ones making funeral-planning decisions, since they are the ones who must live with the plans.

So, when a telemarketer calls trying to convince Lynch to buy pre-need services, asking him, “You don’t want to be a burden to your children, do you?” it occurs to him that his children have been a burden—“lovely burdens, every one of them,” and why shouldn’t he be a burden to his children?

He wrote that he has tended to earaches and has explained his children’s classmates’ suicides and grandparents’ deaths, why love hurts and why life isn’t fair. Coping with such “burdens of love and grief has made me feel alive, involved, evolved in ways I never thought I would be,” he wrote.

Although balding and “fairly bewildered,” he says he feels blessed and thankful.

“If the burden of my death, borne honorably, makes them feel as capable as bearing the sweet burden of their births has made me feel, “Lynch wrote, “I can do them the favor of leaving well enough alone.”