Thomas Lynch is an essayist, poet and funeral director of Lynch & Sons funeral home in Milford, Michigan. His most recent book, released this past June 2005, is "Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans,".
Other more recent books include:"The Undertaking," "Still Life in Milford" and "Bodies in Motion and at Rest." He published his first volume of poetry, "Skating with Heather Grace," in 1987.
Following this unique collection of poems, in 1994, he published his next volume of poetry "Grimalkin & Other Poems."
He is regularly featured on the op-ed page of The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Times of London, as well as in the pages of Harper's. He has appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC, the NBC "Today" program and the PBS series "On Our Own Terms."
Click Here for references.
Click Here for a Sampling of Booking Passage.
FRONTLINE's The Undertaking, coming October 30 at 9 pm on PBS, enters the world of Thomas Lynch, a writer, poet and undertaker whose family for three generations has cared for both the living and the dead in a small Michigan town. Through the intimate stories of families coming to terms with grief, mortality, and a funeral’s rituals, the film illuminates the heartbreak and beauty in the journey taken between the living and the dead when a loved one dies. (click here for details)
Alan Ball (Creator of Six Feet Under) Quotes:
"I cannot claim credit for the premise of SFU. The idea of doing a show about a family-run funeral home was pitched to me by Carolyn Strauss of HBO. She had just finished reading The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford, a non-fiction book about the "death-care industry" first published in the 1960s, and was fascinated by the world of funeral homes. In my research, I also read the Mitford book, but the books I found most helpful were The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade and Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, both by Thomas Lynch, a funeral director and poet, and a brilliant, soulful writer. These two collections of essays about life as an undertaker gave me a sense of the tone I wanted the show to have."
