Death Without Ceremony

My father’s uncle, Thomas Patrick Lynch, got the Spanish flu. He was 12 years old, the youngest son of Irish immigrants who’d escaped the perennial potato blights, political mischief, and poverty of County Clare in the late 19th century. They’d found their way to Jackson, Michigan, where what would eventually be heralded as the “largest walled prison in the world” was a constant work in progress through the Gilded Age, providing plenty of work for Irish laborers. Thomas’s father, my great-grandfather, worked his way up from grunt work to janitor to uniformed guard.

Thomas, for whom I’d later be named, survived the scourge, and his mother proclaimed that God had spared him for a “special calling.” Thus, though he remained wheezy and croupy into his young adulthood, he entered the seminary and became a priest of the Holy Roman, Irish-American, Catholic Church in 1934.

The panoramic photo of his first “solemn high” Mass that year, taken outside St. John’s Church in Jackson,