The Pedagogy of Mourning and Death Education

Catherine, a former student, recently emailed me about how the eulogy I wrote for my beloved wife gave her the courage to write her father’s eulogy. Catherine was a member of an Expository Writing course I taught at SUNY-Albany in the spring of 2004, the semester when my wife Barbara lay gravely ill from pancreatic cancer. In early March, when the doctors told us she was close to death, I informed my students about her condition. The news stunned everyone, for I had not shared this information with them earlier in the semester. Nor could they have known from my demeanor—I am usually playful and high-spirited in the classroom—that Barbara was ill. Barbara did not want to read the eulogy—she said it would make her too sad—but she allowed me to read it to the class. Before beginning, I announced that it would take me about twenty minutes to read the eulogy, and that class would end when I finished. Anyone who wished to leave early, I added, could do so. Finally, in a quiet, measured voice, I began the reading. I struggled to maintain my composure, and when I finished, everyone filed slowly out of the room, shaken by the words of my eulogy for my dying wife.

Barbara died on April 5, and I immediately began writing a book about our life together after her diagnosis on August 12, 2002, one day after our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary. I wanted the book to have a pedagogical focus—a writing teacher sharing the most wrenching experience of his life with his undergraduates, many of whom were sharing painful experiences with him. How did my students feel about hearing me read the eulogy? The week after the reading, I asked them to describe, in a brief, anonymous in-class assignment, how they felt about hearing a teacher eulogize his wife in class. Their responses, which I then photocopied and shared with them, became a chapter in the book. Before the semester ended, I promised my students that I would send each of them a copy of the completed manuscript. I told them that if they shared with me their impressions of reading the entire work, I would include their letters in the appendix of the book.

Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning was published by SUNY Press in 2007. The appendix contains letters from sixteen of the twenty-four students who were in the class. In her letter, Catherine spoke about reading the book on the way to work each morning: “On the Long Island Railroad, miles away from Albany and you, Barbara came alive to this twenty-two-year-old postgraduate. Upon arriving at Penn Station I would stuff the draft back into my bag and wonder if you knew how your words, your life, were floating around in my mind. Looking back, I guess I felt such relief because you had managed to keep a part of your beloved wife alive to others.”

After completing Dying to Teach, I created and taught a new undergraduate course, Love and Loss in Literature and Life, in the spring of 2006. Within a few days, registration for the course closed at its maximum, sixty students. We read several eulogies, elegies, poems, and stories focusing on the literature of bereavement, including Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing (1996), which was eerily relevant to my family’s experience. Shortly before she lapsed into a coma, Barbara asked me, in a barely audible voice, whether I could give her “all the medication”—meaning a fatal dose of morphine. This remains the most un-

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nerving thing I have confronted in my life, and it is the same question that the dying mother asks her daughter in the Quindlen novel. Despite the novel’s central flaw—in real life, no caregiver would be arrested and charged with giving a lethal dose of morphine to a terminally ill person close to death, as Quindlen’s fictional daughter is—One True Thing describes powerfully not only the caregiver’s feelings of guilt, grief, and confusion but also the vexing end-of-life issues that bedevil many families.

What made Love and Loss in Literature and Life distinctive was not the literature we read or even the fact that I often talked about Barbara’s death. Rather, the course was unusual in the seven personal writing essays on death. In one assignment, I paired each person with a classmate and each wrote the other’s obituary; in another, students wrote a eulogy about a person living or deceased; in another, students wrote about how their attitudes toward religion affected their views of death. I graded these essays not on content or degree of self-disclosure but on the quality of their writing because it would be inappropriate for me to grade them on their feelings, beliefs, or values. After teaching the course, I then wrote a book about it—Death in the Classroom: Writing about Love and Loss (forthcoming 2009).

I taught Love and Loss again in the spring of 2007, but this time it was as a writing course with twenty-five students. The only book I asked my students to read was Dying to Teach. This course was even more intense than the first one, mainly because students wrote essays every week, which they read aloud. Now students could write several essays about the significant losses in their lives. Many wrote for the first time about the death of a parent, grandparent, sibling, cousin, or best friend. Three students wrote about having an abortion, an experience that filled these pro-choice individuals with ongoing grief and guilt. The students also kept weekly diaries of their feelings and thoughts about the course. Like Catherine, the overwhelming majority of students in both Love and Loss courses concluded that their writings were painful yet therapeutic. Many said in their anonymous evaluations at the end of the semester that it was the most powerful course they have taken. I am now writing a new book, Write to Life and Death Education, about this course, one that focuses entirely on my students’ writings.

As my students will readily attest, I love to teach. During my wife’s twenty-month struggle with cancer, the only time my life seemed “normal” was when I was in the classroom. I took care of my wife in our home, but I never missed a day of teaching. My colleagues offered generously to take over my classes, but they didn’t realize that teaching was the lifeline that kept me sane. Teaching gave me the strength that I needed as a caregiver.

Why do I write books about death? For many reasons. First, writing is a way to bear witness, to observe and record solemn and sacred experiences that must be told. By writing books about Barbara, I honor her memory and enable students like Catherine to learn about her beautiful life. Second, writing about death helps me to deal with my grief and understand the feelings of sadness, loss, and existential guilt that are part of the process of bereavement. Writing about Barbara became my major task of mourning, a way to work through dark feelings. Writing is a counter-phobic activity, helping one to master fears and losses. Paradoxically, I was so absorbed while writing Dying to Teach that I often forgot about my grief, a phenomenon the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call a “flow” experience. Third, writing about death keeps me securely attached to Barbara, making her a part of my everyday life. Contrary to the influential view of mourning that Freud theorizes in “Mourning and Melancholia”— “Reality-testing has shown that the object [loved one] no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object”—I believe, along with a growing number of contemporary psychoanalysts, that the mourner needs to maintain a relational bond with the deceased. Finally, I write books about death and teach courses on love and loss so that students like Catherine can write about their own losses—past, present, and future.

As far as I know, I’m the only English professor in the country to teach courses on death education. Geoffrey Gorer has observed that just as sex was the great taboo in the nineteenth century, so is death the great taboo in the twentieth—and now the twenty-first century. We are a death-

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denying culture, and college students have few opportunities to speak or write about their experiences with loss. Death is often encountered in English courses—Hamlet’s death, celebrity death, death from the terrorist attacks during 9/11—but students rarely have the opportunity to write about their own experiences with death. I create a safe, empathic classroom where they have the freedom to write about their experiences without the fear of being criticized by their classmates or teacher. Their essays are often emotionally charged because they write about the most important people in their lives. Sometimes they cry when they read an essay aloud, and sometimes their classmates and teacher cry, but there are many more smiles than tears in my classrooms. Students know that only their grammar and style will be discussed in class, not their emotions. They also have the freedom not to write about anything that is too personal or painful.

Catherine mentioned in her letter that I inspire my students. They also inspire me. The courage and truth of their personal essays are striking. Many students have suffered earlier and more frequent traumatic losses than I have. Some have lost a parent at an early age, and a few have lost both parents. Many have suffered a loss that I cannot imagine, the breakup of their family through divorce. In some ways, losing parents through divorce is more shattering than losing them through death. Students write about this and other types of loss, and they almost always feel better as a result of writing. As Catherine implies in her letter, teachers can have a therapeutic impact on their students without pretending they are therapists. Students learn the art of “critique” in their other courses; they learn the art of empathy in mine. They learn to listen carefully and respectfully to each other, knowledge that helps them to understand the other. My students see me as both a teacher and a “real person.” They know that I struggle with many of the same life issues as they do. They hear the sadness in my voice when I talk about Barbara, but they also hear my love for her along with my undying gratitude for having known her. Equally important, they can see that I have survived a devastating loss, which gives them the hope that they too will be able to survive the loss of their loved ones.

All of us confront love and loss, and all of us struggle with age-old questions about death. I believe that teachers would be more willing to allow personal discussions about death in the classroom if they realized that death education is mainly about life education. What better place to talk and write about death and life than the college classroom, where education can become transformative? Educators have long known about the power of teaching. “Education is not a preparation for life, education is life,” John Dewey realized. Students remember best those courses in which they learned, in Catherine’s words, life lessons. These life lessons help all of us, teachers and students alike, when we confront, as we all must inevitably do, sooner or later, the loss of the most important people in our lives.

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