Thomas Lynch

Of course, Waltrip is a Big Mac that comes disguised as the burger you get from your local diner. SCI has made a fortune trading on the long-established names of local funeral directors, who never made in a year what Waltrip has given to the Bush campaigns. To be sure, these firms sold willingly for good money with their eyes wide open. For many funeral directors, as for many Republicans, it all seemed unstoppable, inevitable — SCI was everywhere, lavishing free booze and finger food on us at our state and national conventions, offering cash and stock options and a “bigger is better” view of the future.

This is not evil. It is the late-century American way: to merge and acquire, to buy and sell. And there is nothing inherently wrong with corporate ownership, nor anything especially noble about independent ownership. In every field, there are sloppy independent operators and exemplary corporate ones.

In practice, however, they are organized around essentially different principles. The publicly traded, corporate enterprise is accountable to the international headquarters, the sales quota and the stockholder, while the independent is accountable to the local consumer, including very often the local loan officer. The privately owned firm cannot attribute its prices to some distant “home office” or the “district manager.” It cannot blame shortfalls in service on “company policy.” The privately owned firm must make up in local public trust what it lacks in multinational corporate cover.

For independent companies, market share — present and future — is guaranteed by reputation, while corporates place more stock in pre-need sales. Independents count on the name on the sign. Corporates count on the money in the bank. This is why the hard-sell pre-selling of funerals has increased in direct proportion to consolidation within the funeral service industry. Pre-arrangement is as old as the pyramids, pre-funding as old as the money stuffed in the mattress. But pre-selling — the junk mail, telemarketed, briefcase bargain of the memorial counselors and conglomerates — has turned the funeral from an existential event into a retail one. As more package deals are proffered and pre-sold, the public is quite clearly buying less.

Still, it has seemed to many funeral directors that the only choices were to sell hard or to sell out. SCI, along with Loewen (its recently bankrupt Canadian competition) and Stewart Enterprises from Louisiana, has been wildly successful at persuading funeral directors and their associations that the future belongs to them. The bottom-line sensibilities that turn every sadness into a sales op have convinced a portion of the public that funerals and funeral directors are more trouble than they are worth, and a little like cheeseburgers: all the same.

We are not. The name on my sign, like the names on most, is not Funerals ‘R’ Us or Best Buy Burials or Mortuary Express. The name is mine, my family’s, my father’s and mother’s, my brother’s and sister’s, our son’s and daughter’s. When we serve the families in our town well, they can ignore us, personally. When we don’t, they can complain, personally. It is better consumer protection than the FTC or CNN or anyone in Houston can provide. People talk. Our lives and livelihoods depend on it. The name is worth more than the brick and mortar, the rolling stock or any money in the bank. It is the only one we have. We cannot get another. It determines whom we hire, what we sell, for how much, what we say, who we are and what we do. Home office is here — where the buck stops, where the phone rings in the middle of the night.

And because, like a mother and a father and the love of one’s life, a funeral is a thing we only get one of, funerals do not respond well to efficiencies, conveniences, downsizings, economies of scale or uniformities — all much valued in the corporate world. A funeral is not a great investment; it is a sad moment in a family’s history. It is not a hedge against inflation; it is a rite of passage. It is not a retail event; it is an effort to make sense of our mortality. It has less to do with actuarial profits and more to do with actual losses. It is not an exercise in salesmanship; it is an exercise in humanity.

Waltrip and his “death-care professionals” ignore such distinctions at their peril. The Main Street consumer, the Wall Street investor and the mainstream press have connected these dots. They seem to be voting in their various ways against globalization in the mortuary trades. Maybe Mission Control shouldn’t be in Houston. Maybe the home office should be closer to home. SCI’s stock has fallen from the 40s to the mid-teens this year. A portfolio of “death-care” stocks (SRV, STEI, LWN, HB, YRK) is down more than 60 percent from last summer’s values. The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs has urged the state attorney general to prevent further acquisitions by SCI in that city.

Lawsuits against SCI have been filed by disgruntled investors, outraged families and now, it turns out, the state of Texas’ former chief funeral regulator, Eliza May, who claims she was given her walking papers for investigating Waltrip’s enterprise on reports of unlicensed personnel embalming bodies. The allegation is that Waltrip complained and the investigation went away. And then the investigator did too. Of course, no one wants to connect the dots between May’s dismissal and SCI’s paying George Bush Sr. $70,000 for a speech to the International Cemetery and Funeral Association or donating $100,000 to his presidential library or helping George W. with his White House aspirations.

Here in Middle America, we funeral directors are not entirely stunned that big business, big money and now big politics may all be aligned against us. We are long accustomed to the slings and arrows.

Candidate Bush will not much miss the funeral directors’ vote. We are tiny in the firmament of influence. Points of light, his father called them — who deal with neighbors more than national concerns. Still, skeletons in one’s closet notwithstanding, all politics, like all funerals, are local.

And it is a sure sign, when the flat voice itemizing my voicemail options, and the one giving seat-belt buckling instructions, and the one reciting the daily specials all begin to sound like the one on the evening news and the one on the phone peddling solar heat and the one in the pulpit and behind the bar and in the next seat and there in the headlines of the daily paper and there in the primary colors on T-shirts and junk mail and bumper stickers.

When the voice of my beloved or word from my children or the letters of old friends or the essential texts of the best things I read can’t be distinguished from the rest of what’s out there — from the Weather Channel or the Home Shopping Network or the IRS or PBS or OSHA or A&E or the fax machine — the constant blather and brouhaha of this connected, telecommunicating, 24/7 news cycle televised, dot-com dementia by which fair warnings, sweet nothings, the voice of conscience and complicity all begin to blur into an indistinguishable cacophony, I know I haven’t been getting enough poetry.

Without its directions I lose my way. It is the cipher and the tuning fork for the rest of the language. It makes bearable the burdens of the Information Age by giving the ear a kind of perfect pitch for what is important, what is dismissible, what should be treasured, what to ignore, what to remember, what to say, when to keep silent, what to listen for.

Of course, we live in a place and an age that does not honor its poets. We’re glad enough to have them, to be sure, in the way we are pleased to have good infrastructure, good plumbing, peaceable neighbors — nice so long as we can ignore them. We are delighted that someone is writing poems, especially if we don’t have to read them. Maybe this is why everything sounds like everything else. Poetry doesn’t sell well, rarely does much in the movie version, seldom generates an action figure or a sound track or other “synergies.” It is more life-changing than user-friendly, more essential than salable. It cannot be programmed or mass-produced. It is, like salt and sugar at the groceries, the loss-leader among the literary arts. We publish less, buy less, read less, review less and we are all the less for the lack of it in our daily lives. And more’s the pity. Surely I’m not the only one who notices.

So when I find my tuning off, my antennae for language gone astray, my ear for this life’s meters out of sorts, a remedial dose of poetry is what is called for.

A daily dose would, like an apple or exercise or the habit of prayer, serve as a preventive against most vexations. You can find it on Poetry Daily or there are libraries and megastores, or shelves of slim volumes in your local booksellers. Accept no substitutes. Ask for it by name.

The first poet I met was Michael Heffernan. It was late in the ’60s, and it had always seemed to me that poets were dead, or driving west in fashionably down-market vehicles, wearing trendy footwear and more hair than I was ever going to have. To meet a man with sport coats and a mortgage and a Buick and a day job teaching Melville and Thoreau to the likes of me — to meet an ordinary man who wrote extraordinary poems — well, it changed my life and is changing it still. Heffernan is still writing poems. Here are the names of five books of them.

The Cry of Oliver Hardy

To the Wreakers of Havoc

The Man at Home

Love’s Answer
from which this perfect little diamond of a sonnet informs today:

On the Beach at Saugatuck

What Richard Nixon said at the Great Wall
bears paraphrasing here: It’s a great lake.
I must have died and gone to Saugatuck.
The children dig for China. Several
of the more radiantly animal
natures recumbent everywhere I look
have given up the ghost or taken back
bodies more ancient than the wakened soul.
Instead of China, what the children find
are graves to bury one another in.
They look like ashen warriors when they rise.
I’d like to take them with me by the hand
to rinse them in these waters so they shine,
plainly proclaiming how great the light is.

Or maybe this one to make up for the one you missed yesterday, from Heffernan’s latest collection, The Night Breeze Off the Ocean, which is, at the moment, like too much of this country’s best poetry, still looking for a publisher:

Detroit

I look for grace that opens me to grace.
When that doesn’t come, I turn up the TV
and watch two people talking in Detroit.
I fall asleep and dream I am in Detroit
with Patsy Doherty in a car at night.
She is driving us up Woodward Avenue.
The upper buttons of her blouse are open.
Even though it is 1963,
she wears no bra. Her breasts are staring at
the stoplight on Chicago Boulevard.
I try to understand what they are thinking.
The nipples are soft and small, the breasts are round
and shiny as if she had rubbed oil on them.
The lights change. She drives us into the night.
I wake up thinking this was a miracle.
I had never before seen Patsy Doherty’s breasts,
but now I had. The mind is its own place.

God knows it is.