The American poet, Thomas Lynch, is also hired to bury the dead, to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open and his ears tuned to the vernacular sound of love and grief. In these 12 essays is the voice of both witness and functionary. Here is homage to parents who have died and children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave-markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides - a collection of lessons taught to the living by the dead.