Moveen to Michigan: the same but different

AUGUST 1936. Edward Lynch, a 12-year-old boy whose grandfather emigrated from the townland of Moveen to the US in the late 1800s, accompanies his father to a funeral home in Jackson, Michigan.
Edward’s uncle, aged 32, has just died and Edward’s father is discussing the funeral arrangements with the undertaker. When the young boy leaves his father’s side and wanders around the old mortuary, he witnesses a scene that will shape both his life and that of his descendants. From a doorway, he observes two men carefully lift the vested body of his dead uncle from a white porcelain table into a coffin.
That moment inspired Edward to become an undertaker and, today, Lynch and Sons Funeral Directors is one of the largest family-owned funeral firms in the US. Thomas Lynch, Edward’s son, is both a funeral director and an acclaimed writer of poems and essays, who spends his time between Michigan and Moveen. He launched The Sin-eater: A Breviary, his fifth book of poetry, in the Kilkee Bay Hotel recently.
“I’ve been writing these poems for 30 years,” Mr Lynch says. “The constant theme of exile and repatriation, reconciliation and atonement, is one that the poems rehearse.”
Consisting of 24 poems of 24 lines each, the collection includes 24 black and white photographs of West Clare. The photos were taken by Mr Lynch’s son, Michael and the artwork is by his son, Sean.
The sin-eater of the title is a folklore figure, usually a beggar, who takes on the sins of a corpse by eating a loaf of bread and drinking a bowl of beer over the dead body. Mr Lynch first came across this ritual when he read The History of American Funeral Directing. But the spark for the poems was lit when a sin-eater suddenly appeared in a film, The Master of Ballantrae, Mr Lynch was half-watching with his children in 1984.
“The scene in the movie co-mingled with this paragraph that I read as a child,” Mr Lynch says. “I thought, ‘Oh, now it all makes sense’. Which is why I wanted to do a book of the photographs and the poems. When text and visual image co-mingle, a lot can happen for readers. For me, it was one of those moments of excitement and clarity. The character came easy and started to act like himself almost immediately.”
That character is Argyle, lonely, marginal and despised, who absolves sins while incurring the wrath of the Church in settings across West Clare. Through Argyle’s struggles and his shifting relationship with God, Lynch articulates his own conflicted religious feelings and the simmering tension between belief and apostasy.
“Sins the Church used to look upon as unforgivable, such as suicide, Argyle knew could be acts of hope,” Mr Lynch explains. “Argyle asks the parents of a boy who throws himself off the Cliff at Kilcloher, ‘What say his leaping was a leap of faith into his Father’s beckoning embrace?’ This is contrary to theology or received wisdom and I think Argyle, being close to nature, sees it that way. He is so in need of forgiveness himself. He’s come to the conclusion that either everything will be forgiven or nothing will.”
In a book that grapples with death and society’s reaction to it, the author’s perspective was almost inevitably informed by his work as a funeral director. “Both undertaker and sin-eater,” he writes in the introduction, “know that people in need are glad to see you coming and gladder still to see you gone”. He draws parallels between the rituals associated with death and the role of writing.
“The community act of a funeral is an effort to do something and say something about the unspeakable. It hurts when someone we love dies. We don’t know what to say about it, so we do things. We process mortality by processing mortals: we shoulder them around town, in and out of the church, out to the graveyard.
“We do this because language fails us. So we act it out. In some ways, poetry is an effort to push language to its extremes where it addresses unspeakable things. They both traffic in metaphor, symbol and theatre and we have this sacred language built around the dead and the living.”
It’s a theme Mr Lynch revisits in his rich body of work, including The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade – a collection of essays that won the American Book Award in 1998. Alan Ball, who created the celebrated TV series Six Feet Under, cited the book as the “most helpful” source in developing the show’s tone.
In Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans, Mr Lynch chronicles his experiences between Moveen and Michigan since he first arrived in Clare in 1970. With a high probability of being selected in the Vietnam draft, Mr Lynch arrived on a one-way ticket to the cottage of his great-great-grandfather, where Mr Lynch now lives for part of the year.
“In 1970, the difference between suburban middle America and rural West Clare was fairly significant,” he says. “You’ve really closed that. Everybody’s just got a different cell phone provider but everybody’s got a cell phone. When I first came here, the difference was dramatic.”
Mr Lynch felt an instant sense of belonging and, like his father’s experience in that Michigan funeral home, it exerted a seminal influence.
“I’ll never forget my cousin Nora taking me into a room where the stone walls had just been wallpapered. They were weeping with moisture. It was February and very cold. The wallpaper was peeling off. And Nora opened the door and said, ‘You see, Tom, just like America. The same, but different’.
“And I thought, ‘What great sense that makes’. Everything is the same but different. People certainly are. And watching the way people reacted to a birth or a death in the family, the prospect of love, the worry about getting by, we are all the same but different. It changed my life. I just never stopped coming back. I’m still drawn to it.”

The Sin-eater: A Breviary is published by Salmon Poetry.