It might be hard to imagine that a class that includes field trips to a morgue and a funeral home, and includes a write-your-own-eulogy assignment, as particularly fun and life-affirming. But the course’s professor insists that it’s “really about living rather than dying.”
Prof. Norma Bowe teaches “Death in Perspective” at Kean University in Union, N.J. Despite its macabre subject matter, the class has a three-year waiting list.
Although the students spend the semester meeting murderers at a maximum-security prison and dying patients in a palliative care facility, she says, they come to appreciate the value of their own lives.
“My students face mortality. They’re really brave to do this kind of a thing,” Bowe told CTV’s Canada AM on Wednesday morning.
“But I do it because I really want them to understand that their life is a precious gift and that we’re fragile. So that when we go into the autopsy room or into the morgue or into a funeral home, I want them to understand we’re the sole creators of our life and mortality can hit at any time.”
The goal in the end is to teach her students that “we want to take care of our business and our unfinished business as it comes about,” she says.
Bowe’s career in health care has given her plenty of expertise on the subject. Her nursing career included time assisting patients in palliative care, and their families, prepare for end of life. She also spent time as a nurse advocate for psychiatric patients.
Many of Bowe’s students, although young, already have a lot of experience with death, she says. The school is in an inner-city community, she notes.
As many as three-quarters of her students raise their hand when she asks if they know someone who has been murdered, she says.
To help students cope with that “burden of death,” as she calls it, the class includes lessons on the grief process. On the first day, students form a bereavement circle and take turns talking about loved ones who have died.
“All throughout the semester they’re learning about the biology of dying, they’re learning about the grief process, and then they’re taking these field trips, which pull it all together,” Bowe says.
The students then turn to their own lives to write their own eulogy. They are tasked with imagining themselves dying at age 100, and how they would like their eulogy to read.
“In order to do that, you have to create a life map. You have to think about what people you might want in your life at that point, you have to think about your accomplishments, you have to think about your goals, you have to think about where you might want to live, what kind of work you might want to do,” Bowe says.
“They really enjoy that assignment.”
By the end of the semester, students have a new outlook on life. Some make amends with friends they have been fighting with, or call family members more often.
“They always say at the end of the semester that this course is not really about death, it’s about life and how to live your life and how to treat it with the respect that it deserves.
“They don’t sweat the small stuff anymore.”
