The Death Class: A True Story About Life Read Online Free PDF

through them—children, the blind, and people of all belief systems and cultures—publishing the findings in medical and research journals and books. Still, no one has been able to definitively account for the common experience all of Moody’s interviewees described.
    The inevitable question always followed: Is there life after death?
    Everyone had to answer that question based on his or her own beliefs, the professor said. For some of her students, that absence of scientificevidence of an afterlife did little to change their feelings about their faith. For others, it put that much more pressure on this life.
    In the cemetery that evening, the sky had turned the color of slate. Some of the students were sitting on a curb listening to the lecture with outstretched legs, their feet clad in flip-flops and sneakers. Others leaned against cars. One young man wore his fraternity letters. A couple of young ladies were dressed in business attire: white collared shirts, slacks, and high heels. No one could have known it that day, but a year from now one of those students—the short-haired woman in glasses, holding her spiral notebook, with a beige cardigan over her Kean University T-shirt—would be dead herself, a victim of a house fire that started after she had fallen asleep without putting out her cigarette.
    Norma dismissed her students. They climbed into cars and SUVs, filing out minutes before total darkness fell.
    M OST PEOPLE SAY they do not fear death or barely think about it at all, according to Gallup polls. But Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, argued that we’re kidding ourselves; fear of death makes us want to engage in activities that render us unique, allowing us to reach a level of putative immortality. Death anxiety, Becker believes, is the powerful undercurrent stirring human behavior.
    “What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal?” he wrote. “The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food?”
    But if death is terrifying to most people, Norma knew that her job was to impart the more useful lesson about it: how to live a good life while always under the sharp tip of mortality. The narratives behind the bodies on the autopsy field trips to coroners’ offices on which she tookher students told those truths. Like the seventy-three-year-old splayed on a metal table one morning, his face peeled from his skull, his forehead folded in a flap over his chin. The medical examiner’s report noted that he had hung himself in his garage. His wife had recently died, and it seemed that he could not bear to live on without her.
    Displays of life’s daily horrors, usually hidden from the public’s view, ended up naked and spliced open by blue-gloved technicians, right before her students’ eyes. There was the married thirty-year-old father of three, his mouth open, his arms rigid and cocked. He had been shot in the head. Someone had found him at 9:41 the night before; his belongings had ended up spread across a white sheet on the medical examiner’s floor: a tangerine-and-red flame-colored T-shirt and sneakers that matched, a blood-soaked white undershirt, four packs of Newport cigarettes, a few dozen MetroCards for the New York City subway, $211 in cash.
    And there was the boy who must have been about twelve. He had apparently hung himself in a basement with a dog leash. Norma just could not let that one go. After watching his autopsy on one field trip, she hunted down the information as to where the child’s funeral was being held and decided