Excerpts from essays in author Thomas Lynch's latest publication, "Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality":
"There I was, dumped in my mid-thirties when my wife fell in love with a man from her video-production class at the community college. It is, I suppose, fair to say that before falling in love with him she fell out of love with me, with the idea of being the wife and homemaker two thankless jobs, then as now with the whole 'Leave It to Beaver,' Love Conquers All, early Joni Mitchell version of things that had brought us together 12 years earlier."
From "Y2Kat."
"There is nothing like the sight of a dead human body to assist the living in separating the good days from the bad ones. Of this truth I have some experience. Many's the day I would awaken in gloom a darkness left over from a dream or the night's drinking or a dread of the day I was awakening to. ... It was there, in the parlors of the funeral home my daily stations with the local lately dead that the darkness would often give way to light. A fellow citizen outstretched in his casket ... would speak to me the silent code of the dead: 'So you think you're having a bad day?"'
From "Sweeney Revisited."
"The sad truths I've been taught by the families of the dead are these: seeing is believing; knowing is better than not knowing; to name the hurt returns a kind of comfort; the grief ignored will never go away. For those whose sons and daughters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers and friends went off alive and never did return, the worst that can happen has happened. The light and air of what is known, however difficult, is better than the dark. The facts of death, like the facts of life, are required learning. But oh, so difficult, the tuition."
From "The Way We Are."
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