Continue Your Education

Lenore Skenazy

February 12, 2007

The New York Sun

Old age ain’t for sissies, and here sit the least sissy of them all: retirees filling a New School classroom who have chosen to study not guitar or gardening or “The Films of Woody Allen,” but have signed on for a new class called “Death.”

“Facing the Inevitable” is the subtitle of the class, and it’s all about getting ready, intellectually at least, for the guy with the scythe. “How We Die,” “Sudden Death,” “Lingering Death” * those are just a few of the weekly topics packing them in.

“My friends say, ‘Are you nuts?’” a former director of a nonprofit, Bonnie Dimun, 61, said. Hey, death is just a topic she is keen to study. Ms. Dimun already knows the way she wants to die: in her sleep, “after I’ve straightened out my closet.” That’s funny * I’d rather die than straighten out my closet. That’s the whole purpose of the class: to hear different ideas about death gleaned from books, films, poems, and the sensibly shoed students themselves * about two dozen of them.

“We’re going to start class today with why you personally don’t want to die,” the facilitator, Carolyn Grossner, said. (All the classes in this division, the Institute for Retired Professionals, are taught by Institute members on a volunteer basis.) Clearly, Ms. Grossner is no novice at teaching because she quickly adds, “No long stories! Please do not say, ‘I have a granddaughter -and she has beautiful long, red hair and she plays the piano. *’ Say, ‘I will miss seeing her grow up.’”

“I don’t want to miss my daughter’s life,” one chastened class member says.

Everyone appreciates the brevity. (Life is short!)

“I want to know what’s going on in politics, international events, and war,” another * perhaps quintessential * New School goer says. “I don’t want to die because morning showers feel better all the time, and the perfect peach gets more and more perfect,” a student named Victor Hughes says. He gets some laughs, but there’s a lot of nodding, too. You don’t come to a class on death, it seems, if you’re not still pretty high on life.

After everyone talks about their future grief about their future death, they turn to the day’s readings, ranging from Epicurus’s tract on why death is not to be feared to * talk about inevitable * Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays With Morrie.” It sounds like your basic Great Books discussion, except the questions keep hitting home.

“Can you really ‘grow’ through death?” one of the students asks after summarizing an article that called death “the most profound growth event of our total growth experience.”

Lots of grumbling from the class follows. “I hate the word ‘emotional growth,’” Isabella Aldon, 82, says. As a former doctor, she says she saw plenty of death and dying. A “growth experience” is not how she’d describe it. “The body is diminished. It’s getting smaller. As far as intellectual growth, it’s hard to imagine. So is it possible to grow at least spiritually and emotionally?”

“I don’t think there’s time,” a practical student says.

“I think it can be a stimulant,” a man in the back row says. “I had a therapist who, when I’d get stuck, used to say, ‘You’re going to die! Get over it!’” That perspective allowed him to move on.

Ms. Grossner admits she’s had trouble with the idea of death as a growth experience, despite the fact she’s teaching this class on death, which is intended to be a growth experience. Growth through death just sounds so New Age. “But,” she adds, “growth could be reaching out to other people. Or it could be recognizing our place in the universe,” i.e., that we are but bubbles in the mighty stream of eternity. That’s growth. “And giving things away” * that’s growing beyond the material, right?

The class chews on this for a while.

No one looks much happier about the prospect.

“When you go to the beauty * I mean, the funeral parlor,” the retired doctor, Ms. Aldon, says, the bodies always look so happy. So alive. But really, they’re in a totally different place. Is it a happy one?

Ah, that is to be determined next week, when the topic is “Immortality.” In the meantime, class is over. It’s time for lunch * and perhaps a perfect peach.