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

to attend.
    There was no denying it: life’s edges brimmed with misery and cruelty. No wonder people often concluded that the dead were better off. In our youth, we looked forward to our futures, like “children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin,” the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote. “It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.”
    By the time many of Norma’s students came to her, they were already exhausted and confused about life and looking to find out how not to carry it out like a sentence.
    In 1985, two researchers from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette embarked on what would become a twenty-year study to solve this question: what kind of students take death education courses in college, and why?
    Sarah Brabant and Deann Kalich surveyed more than nine hundred students enrolled in Brabant’s Sociology of Death and Dying course and found that nearly 24 percent wanted to deal with their own grief issues; but, most startlingly, close to half of the students surveyed had “seriously contemplated committing suicide at some time in their lives.” Even more distressing, 10 percent of the students said they had actually tried to kill themselves at one point.
    Norma saw all of this in sentences sprinkled through her students’ essays. Like this one from a student who had been homeless: “I used to pray every day until one day I lost hope and it felt like it was pointless.” Or this one: “After I was raped I wanted to curl up in a ball and die.”
    The professor referred students to the college counseling center on a regular basis. They called her in the middle of the night, in the early morning, during class, during lunch; they sent urgent text messages, knocked on her office door in tears, broke down sobbing with her in hallways. She kept a school mental health counselor’s phone number in her cell phone. But some students simply threw it away when Norma jotted it down for them. They didn’t want to talk to a stranger. They only wanted to talk to her.
    So Norma’s message was that happiness takes hard work. It should be approached like a series of homework assignments. She kept a small book in her office, A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen, which she often quoted to students from memory. This was one of her favorite lines: “Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.” Quindlen went on, “We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.”
    Living a long life didn’t come with any promises that it would be a happy one either. Norma learned this lesson on her own when she was a twenty-something nurse in Virginia. On home visiting duty, she met a 110-year-old woman living alone in a trailer in the woods. Mary Manly was her name. Her only son had died in his eighties, and all she had left was a little black mutt with a gray chin that seemed as old as his owner, hobbling around on his little legs. Mary had a wound on her leg, and Norma stopped by to tend to it every few days.
    One day, she treated the wound with a wet-to-dry sterile dressing,chatting with Mary. As she was leaving the trailer, Norma looked back over her shoulder. Through a window, she watched Mary grab a bag of cornmeal, rip off the dressing, and stuff the ground dried maize into her wound.
    Norma went back later and confronted her. “Look, Mary, I saw the cornmeal. What was that about?”
    Mary looked at her. “I don’t like the feel of the wetness!” she snapped. “I want it to be dry.”
    “Okay, but you can tell me that,” she said. “Cornmeal is going to make it stay like a wound. It’s not going to