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In the recent article “Taking Time Off” in The February 5 Columbia Spectator (http://www.columbiaspectator.com/home/index.cfm?event=displayArticle&ustory_id=c12f071c-62c4-4051-a701-021d3dd95de4), Devika Bhushan explores a variety of students’ reasons for taking time off from college. She is specifically interested in undergraduates who take off a year to pursue other interests, but she cites a remarkable statistic from the U.S. Department of Education’s 2002 Condition of Education Report: “Seventy-three percent of all undergraduates in the 1999-2000 academic year were defined as nontraditional students who did not enroll full-time in college immediately after high school, supported themselves, or held full-time jobs during the school year.”
After more than ten years in continuing ed, I was shocked by the seventy-three percent figure. I think that if such statistics were better known, nontraditional students would be more likely to enroll in programs and courses of all kinds, and any stigma surrounding a generation gap in classes would be mitigated.
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I thought this was of interest with regard to the age spectrum in continuing ed, in this case closer to the end of the spectrum. Strikes me that maturity of all kinds – literal, spiritual, intellectual — is required to tackle one’s own mortality. That sort of self-awareness, as well as the thoughtfulness and humor evidenced below, seems valuable in any class.
SIGNING UP TO STUDY DEATH by
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.
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“Growing up is a lifelong task” touts an ad from the Marble Collegiate Church. If that’s the case then much of our experience qualifies as continuing education. This past weekend my lessons were taught to me in New Orleans. I was as hesitant as anyone about visiting a devastated post-Katrina New Orleans, especially after frequent recent reports of horrendous crimes, notably murder as sport. But having lived in
New Orleans, I was eager to see for myself what had become of that beloved city.
After a very short time, I realized that New Orleans was still the exciting, fun-loving, smart place that everyone thinks of. Only more so. An acquaintance from the trip noted that New Orleans is “more itself than ever.” I have to think that he meant that the zeal and lust for life that existed before Katrina were heightened by the disaster, that each day and each interaction were now cherished. Everyone waves. You wave at your neighbors. If you don’t know someone, you wave. The homeboy in the gold-embossed hooded sweatshirt pulled ominously over his eyes waved at me. Strangers do drive-by waves, not drive-by shootings. I came this close to kissing the cabdriver who took me to the airport good-bye; I opted to give her a 30% tip. It can’t be easy for her. It’s not easy for anyone. But she talked about the parade last night, not her worries.
All of the locals spoke of circumstances “after the storm,” but they didn’t do so out of self-pity or nostalgia. “After the storm, we shop here.” “After the storm, I go to church there.” So what are our lessons, boys and girls? Something good can and does and has come out devastation. That the human spirit — or at least the spirit of New Orleans — can triumph over adversity. Pretty valuable continuing education if you ask me. In fact, I’m making plans for more classes during Jazzfest. You should too (it’s the last weekend in April and first weekend in May).
