Thomas Lynch is an undertaker, and also a poet. The Undertaking is a prose book that outlines his perspectives on dying, death, and what happens next. It’s beautifully written, and carefully considered. Here’s a brief excerpt on suicide. It’s a bit graphic, so skip it if you’re squeamish: “He took the deer rifle from her father’s closet, lay on the bed with the muzzle in his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his big toe. It was, according to the ex-girlfriend, ‘a remarkable gesture.’ As I considered the gesture on the table before me, it struck me, he looked ridiculous. His face had been split in two by the force of the blast, just above the bridge of his nose. He looked like a melon dropped from the cart, a pumpkin vandalized by neighbor boys. The back of his head simply wasn’t. Here was a young man who had killed himself, remarkably, to deliver a message to a woman he wanted to remember him. No doubt she does. I certainly do. But the message itself seemed inconsequential, purposefully vague. Did he want to be dead forever, or only absent from the pain? ‘I wanted to die,’ is all it seemed to say clearly. ‘Oh,’ is what the rest of us say.”