There was nothing I could do to avoid it. We were in a high school drama, and the script called for a kiss between my character and Marjean’s. The first kiss came at dress rehearsal when the high school English teacher ordered us to become intimate. So we did.

But I could sense in Marjean’s demeanor a certain reluctance, which probably had something to do with her boyfriend standing in the wings. It probably also had to do with the fact that I was too eager and much too immature to be kissing a girl right square on the mouth.

We kissed at rehearsal, and then we had to repeat the act at two performances, one Friday and Saturday evening. In Friday’s version, we kissed amidst oohs and aahs from the audience of 100 people. I thought this was a sign that I had performed admirably.

Saturday went about the same way, with Marjean standing stiff and straight and me bending to the task.

It wasn’t until years later that I figured out that the oohs and aahs had nothing to do with my expertise as a kisser, but rather that an audience is always nervous when private acts are performed in public.

I also figured out my severe apprehension — a sweaty, trembling nervousness — was due in part to the undeniable fact that Marjean was the undertaker’s daughter.

Of course, I wondered what it would be like to kiss the mouth of a girl who probably saw dead bodies, weeping relatives and funerals every day of the week.

So I was thinking about Marjean the other day as I read the latest book by Thomas Lynch, a bona fide undertaker, an excellent writer and an all-around nice guy. In the essay I was reading, Lynch was talking about funeral conglomerates, those ol’ bad corporations that are trying to make big bucks off our deaths.

I sensed that Lynch was not entirely against these mega-companies that deal in tragedy. But Lynch wants people to get a square deal, and he doesn’t want anyone getting bamboozled during their weakest moment. There is a fear that all those family-owned funeral homes, when they become part of a giant conglomerate, will put profit ahead of compassion.

“A funeral is not a great investment; it is a sad moment in a family’s history,” Lynch writes. “It is not a hedge against inflation; it is a rite of passage. ... It is not an exercise in salesmanship; it is an exercise in humanity. Both the death-care consumers and the death-care conglomerates ignore such distinctions with peril.”

Lynch’s new book of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, (W.W. Norton and Co., $23.95) is a mastery of ultimate emotion. He talks about God and his control of that moment we all resist when death overtakes us. And yet Lynch is never grim because in this Irishman there is a sense of humor that transcends tragedy and searches instead for a moral victory.

In one of the essays in his new book, Lynch writes about his divorce, which happened nearly 30 years ago, with such honesty that a knowing reader is left weeping and laughing. There are so many blessed moments, such as the one when mother and father bring the children together for the sad news.

“The next day we assembled the children ... and told them all the ordinary lies failed marrieds must tell the ones they’ve failed the most — how everything was going to be all right and that even though Mommy and Daddy didn’t love each other anymore we both loved them more than anything in the world. ... They were ten, nine, six and four when it happened. The day sits like a lump of coal in their lives, sometimes smoldering, sometimes dark and cool, but always there, always ready to be reddened by forces still out of our control.”

Anyone who has been through a moment like that with children knows the damage that has been done, knows the scars that disfigure life and the questions that will always plague them. These essays are full of life, the happy moments but also the honest grieving.

And in the end we discover that life is wrapped around those things; kissing the undertaker’s daughter, grieving for the ones we love and discovering the brightness just around the corner from death.

Clark D. Morphew