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"I stood among the tombstones, thinking. Sometimes I laughed, sometimes cried, and sometimes nothing happened. Life goes on, and the dead are everywhere, Eddie said. These are all ordinary things." From a unique perspective, the author uses prose-style writing to show us the daily work of an undertaker and the deep thinking about life and death accumulated over more than 20 years. What is recorded in it includes not only my own observations of individual events, but also some emotional experiences. With his triple identity as a funeral director, poet and writer, the text frankly and sincerely allows readers to understand how a dedicated funeral director respects the deceased and their families, and how he serves the living by taking care of the deceased. Reading this book will help us better understand the meaning of life.

Like all poets, Thomas Lynch used death as his theme, but he was unique in that he was a mortician in a small Michigan town, hired to bury and burn the dead. As he works, he remains keenly attuned to the words of love and sorrow conveyed through death. In this book, there are golfers playing golf by the graveside, gourmets and hypochondriacs, lovers, suicides, cruel and unfortunate deaths, and more touching stories that are not cruel and unfortunate. Some funerals are joyful, while other weddings are tear-jerking. "Undertaker's Notes" is filled with the dual voices of witnesses and participants. Lynch stood between life and death, with anger, surprise, fear, and calm, trying to get a glimpse of the meaning of death to life that we all will eventually understand, and conveying the warnings of the dead to the living.

From the early 1970s, Thomas Lynch began to get in touch with the tribesmen living in Ireland. Over the past thirty-five years, he crossed the Atlantic dozens of times, traveling back and forth between Ireland and the United States. Lynch followed his family's migration trajectory, looking back on its history and stories, examining his own life, and also thinking about issues such as ethnic belonging and identity. In this work that is half memoir and half cultural study, Lynch writes about his great-grandfather who spoke with an Irish accent about the American dream, and his distant relatives who were enemies of the government for land rights in his later years. He also recalled his own struggle with alcoholism, his former feminist life, and his bittersweet marriage... The character of his writing always hovers between the dual identities of undertaker and poet. His writing style is light and humorous, and is always full of profound philosophical thinking.