By Steve Hintz

As an expert on the processes of dying, Thomas Lynch certainly exudes life. The writer/funeral director was hanging out on a beautiful summer mid-afternoon at the Wydham hotel in Milwaukee, only hours before giving a lecture and reading on his newest publication, Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans (W.W. Norton, ISBN: (0-393-04206-5, $24.95). He was comfortable and confident, radiating the sort of wisdom that a man of vast education radiates. 

"I dropped out of Oakland University after only a semester of study," he begins his tale. This lead ead him to visit Ireland at the age of 21, during the height of the Vietnam War. "I discovered that my number hadn’t been picked in the Nixon Draft Lotto and I didn’t have to worry about getting shipped off," he recalled.

At every dinner presided over by his grandfather, Ed Lynch, young Lynch heard about his family in Ireland The older man would say at the end of grace, "And don’t forget your cousins Tom and Sharon on the banks of the River Shannon." This phrase resonated and eventually became the beckoning call to begin his grandson’s adventure. 

This sense of family in Ireland led him to visit Moveen for the first time in 1970, settling at the edge of the ocean in West Clare. The ancestral cottage was the same one that his great-grandfather, another Thomas Lynch, had left nearly a century before on a one-way ticket to America. That was author Lynch’s first of many back to the isle, which has become the inspiration for his musings on life and death and the culture. Irealnd also became the microcosm by which to study the rest of the world. 

Although he does some of his writing in Moveen, the majority is done in his house in Milford, Mich. The son of a funeral director, his family now owns six funeral homes in the Milford area. He is one of nine children, but the only writer. He gets up early and, after reading the daily obituaries, begins to write and revise. Lynch first published a collection of poetry in the 1980s and continues to write in the genre, his most recent work being a collection entitled Still Life in Milford.

Alan Ball, the creator and executive director of the hit HBO series Six Feet Under, is a good friend of Lynch’s. The series, about a family-run funeral home in Los Angeles, has garnered high ratings for the network, two Golden Globes (including Best Drama Series) and six Emmy awards. Ball was awarded an Emmy and a DGA award for directing the pilot of Six Feet Under, his directorial debut. 

The two met after Ball had read some of Lynch’s earlier works,which laid the groundwork for the show. "Once you put a dead guy in a room, you can talk about anything," Lynch remembered. Ball telling him on a phone call. "I finally figured out the formula…a dead guy ups the emotional ante, immediately," he said.

But Lynch had evidently learned the formula well before meeting Ball. He wrote about the business of funerals in The Undertaking, which won an American Book Award and was a finalist in the National Book Award competition. Lynch has long taken in the lessons that the dead have shared with him. He talks about the wisdom of the Irish wake and the process of dealing with death. "The idea behind the wake is to "wake the dead," by moving them from bed to church to coffin. The celebration and mourning processes are drawn out to allow for a full range of emotional outlets." "A good wedding and a good funeral are similar…they encompass that whole range," he asserted.

His book also encompasses great range. With chapter titles like "Great Hatred," "Little Room" and "Bits and Pieces," Lynch has presented readers with a myriad of outlooks on people’s relationships to the environment, the similarities that tie us together as humans and the humor within the struggle from birth till death.