Thomas Lynch
The Ache in Our Hearts: Thomas Lynch on Ancestral Homes & Old vs. New World Ways to Mourn
Season 3
Episode 4
Things discussed in this episode:
The nature of grief
American society’s aversion to death and why
The shifting nature of funerals
Old world ways of mourning
Traditional funeral rites
Mourning those we’ve lost in a meaningful way
Ireland and its culture
The Irish “Famine” and Italian “Unification” as euphemisms for what really happened
Re-connecting to our ancestral homeland
The dark and light sides of embracing ethnic identity
Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems and four books of essays, as well as a bo ok of stories, Apparition & Late Fictions.
His work has been the subject of two film documentaries—PBS Frontline's The Undertaking, which won the 2008 Emmy Award for Arts and Culture Documentary, and Learning Gravity, produced for the BBC, featured at the 2008 Telluride Film Festival and awarded the Michigan Prize. He has taught with the Department of Mortuary Science at Wayne State University in Detroit, with the graduate program in writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and with the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.
His essays, poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic and Granta, The New York Times and Times of London, The New Yorker, Poetry and The Paris Review and elsewhere. He lives in Milford, Michigan where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage.
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