The Professor as a Role Model for Love, Loss, and Recovery

Students are normally shielded from issues involving death and dying; however since the death of my wife, Barbara, on April 5, 2004, I have been teaching courses and writing books on love and loss. Consequently, students now see me as a person who has been “touched by death.” The phrase comes from Robert Kastenbaum, who observes in The Psychology of Death (2006) that although there are many ways to describe a person’s attitude toward death, probably the best distinction is that between the touched and the untouched. “This is the most basic and natural distinction that I have observed, whether in a hospital, a classroom, or a community setting. There are people who convey a sense of having been touched by death, and others who behave as though untouched” (p. 233). In being touched by death, I have become, for many of my students, a role model for love, loss, and recovery.

To understand how my students regard me, I want to look at their responses to my book, Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning (SUNY Press, 2007). The memoir recounts my life with Barbara from her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in August 2002 until her death 20 months later. She allowed me to read my eulogy of her to my Expository Writing students in the spring of 2004, and I kept

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them informed of her rapidly declining health. I began writing the book immediately after her death. I told my students that after I finished the manuscript, I would send each of them a copy. If they were interested in writing to me, sharing their reactions to reading the manuscript, I promised to include their letters in the appendix. Sixteen of the 24 students gave me permission to include their writings, all but one allowing me to use their names.

The 16 letters offer a fascinating insight into how they viewed me. The letters are sincere and heartfelt; since the students had already received their final grades and had graduated from college, there was no particular reason for them not to be candid about their responses. A number of students, including Kunal, perceived me as a Virgilian guide who steered them through purgatory and hell and then brought them safely home again, changed irrevocably by the experience. “Jeff Berman’s Dying to Teach takes you to a scary place but it brings you back with a greater sense of knowledge” (p. 238). Kristen, who had lost four female relatives to cancer, felt that reading the memoir made her less

“avoidant” of death. Like many of her classmates, she ended the letter by thanking me for sharing the story of Barbara’s life and death with her. Leslie wrote that my course helped her to confront death for the first time. Attending the funeral of her beloved grandmother a few months earlier, Leslie discovered, to her dismay, that she remained emotionally numb. Reading aloud to the class an essay about her grandmother’s death, however, proved unexpectedly wrenching to her. “Tears formed in my eyes. I could not finish the reading. This was a pivotal moment in my life. This was the first time I had publicly shed tears over a death” (p. 245).

Leanne was surprised that I included in Dying to Teach the class’s responses to my eulogy of Barbara. “This memoir exemplifies the ability to merge the ‘advancement of knowledge’ with its ‘human application’” (p. 247), something

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that she had not previously encountered in her college courses. “You have given yourself a human face with which most students can identify and that in and of itself has a shock value that keeps students engaged and inspired” (p. 247). Catherine did not mention in her letter the deaths of any loved one, but she sent me an email a year after the publication of Dying to Teach in which she revealed that her father had died recently of cancer and, as a result of reading my book, she was able to eulogize him.

Only two of the 16 students expressed ambivalence about reading the manuscript. Erin felt detached and cold, the same way she felt when her father died years earlier. She preferred to avoid thinking about death, partly because she was terrified that her husband would die prematurely, like his and her own father. Nevertheless, at the end of the letter she writes, “A college education should be about more than just guidelines, textbooks, and tests. A college education should include exploration and self-discovery even if it is uncomfortable, or perhaps especially so” (p. 257). It was painful for Jennifer to read the manuscript because her favorite uncle had just died from AIDS. “I was angry that with each page I read, death was thrust into my face and I was forced to confront it. I was angry at my uncle for losing the battle.” Yet she closes by admitting that reading and writing about our deceased loved ones keep them alive in our hearts.

By reading Dying to Teach on their own time, more than a year after the course ended, my students demonstrate that education continues outside the classroom. Many of them regard me not only as a role model for love, loss, and recovery but also as an attachment figure, for they regularly send me emails describing their present lives. Most of the 16 students believe that courses on death education should be offered at universities—though they are quick to add that such courses should be elective, not required. Most of them would agree with me that courses on death education are also

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about life education. Reading Dying to Teach gave Matthew an insight into the “cliff of death,” but he glimpsed another aspect of the view below. “It is not one of the ‘valley of death’ but of life” (p. 243).

Because we live in a death-denying culture, it is rare for a professor to speak so personally in the classroom. Far from regarding my self-disclosures as narcissistic, self-indulgent, or transgressive, my students welcome them, since they are able to see me as a “real person.” They also see me as a role model, a mentor. I am a role model in many ways: I encourage students to speak and write openly and honestly about death, express their thoughts and feelings about death (the Chinese ideogram for “thought” is made of two characters, “brain” and “heart”), eulogize their lost loved ones, reflect upon the meanings of death, and appreciate every moment of life. Perhaps most important, I demonstrate to them that one can remain attached to the dead while engaged fully with the living.

Role models are not experts: most thanatologists would agree that there are no experts on death. We all die in different ways, and no one lives to narrate the story of his or her death. Nor do role models need to be brave or courageous. I readily confess that I am a “catastrophizer,” a word I learned when I was in therapy. I see myself as being blessed—a strange word for an agnostic to use by the ability to love and be loved. I was fortunate to be married for 35 years to an extraordinary woman who was my muse in life and now in death. My classrooms are emotionally charged, but there are many more smiles than tears. My students, some of whom have no relationship with one or both parents as a result of death or divorce, see me as a person who loved deeply, experienced a devastating loss, and then recovered to write and talk about love and loss. My students don’t feel burdened by my self-disclosures. On the contrary: they feel emboldened to write about their own experiences with grief

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and, in the process, they feel better. As I have suggested in Risky Writing and Empathic Teaching, there are many commonalities between the talking cure and the writing cure. Death education courses can be helpful for those who have and have not yet been touched by death. All of us, teachers and students alike, will eventually confront our own and others’ mortality, and we can all learn from stories of love, loss, and recovery.

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