The Depositions Quotes

“The effort to minimize the hurt by minimizing the loss, pretending that a dead body has lost it's meaning or identity, is another tune we whistle past the graveyard. 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 already happened. The light and the 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.”
― Thomas Lynch, The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be

“We have no parlors anymore, no hearthsides. We have, rather, our family rooms in which light flickers from the widescreen multichannel TV on which we watch reruns of a life we are not familiar with. Kitchens are not cooked in, dining rooms go dusty. Living rooms are a kind of mausolea reserved for “company” that seldom comes.”
― Thomas Lynch, The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be

“THE THING ABOUT the new toilet is that it removes the evidence in such a hurry. The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has “civilized” us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish. No more the morning office of the chamber pot or outhouse, where sights and sounds and odors reminded us of the corruptibility of flesh. Since Crapper’s marvelous invention, we need only pull the lever behind us and the evidence disappears, a kind of rapture that removes the nuisance. This dynamic is what the sociologist, Phillip Slater, called “The Toilet Assumption,” back in the seventies in a book called The Pursuit of Loneliness. He was right: having lost the regular necessity of dealing with unpleasantries, we have lost the ability to do so when the need arises. And we have lost the community well versed in these calamities. In short, when shit happens, we feel alone.”
― Thomas Lynch, The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be