Charles P. Farrar has served as Staff Chaplain for DMC Huron Valley, Harper, Hutzel Women’s and Detroit Receiving Hospitals and the Karmanos Cancer Institute since 2003. Formerly he served as Pastor of St. Gabriel Church in Detroit and Associate Pastor of St. Vincent de Paul Church in Pontiac. He holds a degree in English from University of Notre Dame, a Juris Doctorate from the University of Michigan Law School, and Master of Arts and Master of Divinity from Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit where he was an Adjunct Professor of Theology. Chaplain Farrar is the Past President of the Michigan Chaplains Association, a member of the State Bar of Michigan and is widely published in pastoral care and counseling journals on subjects related to end-of-life and palliative care, spirituality, and religious practices. Pastor Chip will present at the DMC Huron Valley Hospital lecutre series.
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Thomas Lynch is a writer and a funeral director. The Undertaking, his first book of nonfiction, won The American Book Award, The Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It is published in eight languages. Bodies in Motion and at Rest won the Great Lakes Book Award and Booking Passage, was named a 2006 Notable Book by the Library of Michigan. A book of short stories, Apparition and Late Fictions, and a new collection of poems, Walking Papers, will be published in 2010. His work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere. The PBS/Frontline film, “The Undertaking,” based on his book and broadcast nationwide, won the 2008 Emmy Award for Arts & Culture Documentary. He is an adjunct professor with the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Mr. Lynch lives in Milford, Michigan where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland where he keeps an ancestral cottage.
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Dana M. Nowak is a lifelong resident of the Huron Valley area. Following graduation from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she designed a degree curriculum titled, “Perspectives on Death & Dying,” she completed the requirements for licensure as a funeral director at Wayne State University Department of Mortuary Science, where she was President of the Class of 2009. She is the recipient of scholarships from The American Board of Funeral Service Education and the International Order of the Golden Rule. Ms. Nowak has worked with Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors in Milford since 2002 where she has, in conjunction with Milford Township Library, been in charge of an oral history project called “On the Record.” Now resident director of the Lynch & Sons facility in Brighton, she is a member of the Michigan Embalmers Society and the National Funeral Directors Association.