I picked up The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade because the author, Thomas Lynch will be at a writer's conference I'm attending next month with my friend Lori. And the topic is not without interest to me. One of my uncles is a funeral director and I've spent many a Christmas Eve in the apartment above the funeral home, occasionally feeling sad for the rare family who were holding viewing services on that night. My friends always thought it was creepy that we went to the funeral home for Christmas Eve, but it's not like the corpses were sitting around drinking eggnog with us.
I shouldn't even have picked it up. I still had to finish two other books for a review I'm writing for BreakPoint, and I was already in the middle of two other books; but there it sat, beckoning me..."open me, read me, just a few pages...." I caved. And read this:
"Wary of being caught unawares, we [Baby Boomers] planned our parenthood, committed to trial marriages with pre-nuptials, and pre-arranged our parents' funerals--convinced we could pre-feel the feelings that we have heard attend new life, true love, and death. And for all our planning, for all our micromanagement, for all our yammering about our parents' mistakes, we abort more, divorce more, and soon will kevork more than any twenty generations on the globe before us."
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