In Florida: A Life and Death Class

By Melvin Maddocks

About 20 minutes outside Gainesville, Fla., stands an old country cemetery.

A motorist compelled by the urgent and forgettable business that seems to possess most people behind steering wheels could speed right past the six acres of oak ridge plots, as oblivious as a sinner out of Pilgrim's Progress. But if the wayfarer is inspired to take a sideways look, on certain balmy days he may glimpse a scene as astonishing as any vision by John Bunyan.

Under the live oaks, draped with Spanish moss, a small band of nine-and ten-year-olds scramble among the tombstones with the quick casual grace of children playing games in their own familiar schoolyard. In the midst of death--to reverse the proverb--there is life. And what life. Life in yellow T shirts with maroon-letter messages like "Whereinthehell is Gainesville, Fla.?" Life, chewing sugarless grape gum with great juicy smacks. Life about as far from death as life can get.

For Judith Shaak--the dark-haired young woman a little off to one side, whose restless, measuring eyes say teacher--this exuberant encounter between the very living and the very dead is no random happening. The little girls chasing lizards around the sandy grave of Madison Starke Perry (1814-1865), the fourth Governor of Florida, and the boys swigging Coke while making tombstone rubbings with brilliant red crayons are members of the Enrichment Class for Life and Death at the Myra Terwilliger Elementary School, now in session. And Mrs. Shaak--in her third year of leading dry runs through the Valley of the Shadow--could not be more pleased by what she sees.

Near the tombstone inscribed "Our Mammy," Christa Barker kneels to examine the seashells heaped as decoration above one or two graves. Martha Hale jumps up and down, shouting "Isn't he darling?"--summoning everybody to the sculptured dog that stands on guard at the front and center of a family plot. Wylie Cohn picks out a weather-blackened stone engraved with the two words: "Not Dead." Sucking his breath in a whistle, Wylie says, "He really didn't want to die."

Strolling along a row like a window shopper on a summer day, Kevin Johnson stumbles across a coincidence much to his liking. Pointing to the first name on a marker, he commands Martha Hale: "Lay down, Martha. You're dead." The joke, Martha decides, is meant kindly, and she joins in the laughter that scatters over the scene like the sunbeams through the moss-fringed trees.

Death, Arnold Toynbee once said, is unAmerican. But not today. Death-education courses now abound all over the country for college, high school and elementary students. Their philosophy parallels the one that is used to justify sex education courses--talk about a subject that has been nearly taboo, and therefore mysterious and frightening, and everybody will probably feel better. One of the standard texts, by Gene Stanford and Deborah Perry, is even called Death Out of the Closet. The gifted fourth-and fifth-graders, mostly with IQs above 125, who make up Mrs. Shaak's little flock are simply dragging the dark angel into the Florida sunlight and making death almost ordinary.

The Terwilliger School used to lie across the street from pasture land. Times change. Now grazing cows have been replaced by a Burger King. Mrs. Shaak's Life and Death classroom at first looks like just another concrete-and-glass modular unit of 1970s education. Scrawled student papers cover the walls, but they are not quite the usual exercises. On a sort of bulletin board the children have posted their own epitaphs inside crudely drawn tombstones. Nicole Carpenter writes:

Here lies Nicole

Who fell in a hole.

Without a doubt She could not get out.

Dan Smith's inscription reads:

Here lies Dan.

He was hit by a van

When living in Japan.

At the front of the room self-composed obituaries are displayed: "Alec Tilley died at the age of 87. He died of old age at his own home . . . Remembered for great playing in sports. Send flowers. . ."

A charmingly unassuming but determined woman, Mrs. Shaak coaxes doctors to visit the Life and Death class. The relentless children ask them:

"How do you tell someone they're going to die?"

"Is there really a spirit?"

One earnest bad speller asks in writing: "How do you preform and octopsy?"

Lawyers advise the class how to write a will, and each child does. A girl stipulates: "I leave my bed to my second cousin Millie." A boy's will: "My puppy to Tim. Fonz helmet to Tom." Out of who knows what urge one willmaker allots his comic books to his brother but specifies:

"My horn, my stick and rope to be put in my casket with me."

Games are played ("You have just been informed that you have only one year to live . . ."). Life and death questionnaires are submitted to each class.

Sample question: "What happens when people and animals die?" Sample answer:

"Everything is sad and not very active."

Mrs. Shaak wrote her master's thesis on the way children's books deal with death. She discovered a "grandfather's gone on a long trip" evasiveness. Her charges read books like A Taste of Blackberries, in which a child dies of bee stings.

They see films like Annie and the Old One, in which a Navajo girl learns to accept--big word--her grandmother's dying.

The fancy is stretched to imagine life's last event by every device of art, by every technique of simulation. Yet finally nothing will do but to meet death face to face. It is time for the ultimate field trip. Station wagons and minibuses piloted by volunteer mothers head out for the Williams-Thomas Funeral Home.

If funeral directors are expected to be lank, lugubrious, waxen creatures like their customers, Mickey Milam, a smiling cherub of a man, provides the perfect antistereotype. In the Chapel of the Chimes, flanked by potted palms and backed by taped music, Mickey delivers his stand-up speech on the history, evolution, and utter necessity of the funeral home professional. Who else knows just how to suture the lips shut? Who else knows just where to make the incision so "you're gonna get your best drainage?"

The Life and Death class listens patiently. When the meeting opens for questions, half a dozen hands shoot up. Has Mickey ever had a corpse come to life? Is there any demand for glass coffins? Eventually the questions get personal. Mickey is asked: "Are you going to be cremated?" He shakes his head no. Mickey is only 39, but the hint of a shadow crosses his face. He volunteers that the males in his family generally start dying from 62 on. Clearly it is time to tour the casket selection room.

Mickey's smile revives as he slaps a coffin and extols the virtues of 20-gauge steel. With undercoating. He points to one casket that boasts a watertight seal; he points to another that does not. "Caskets are Like cars," he philosophizes. "Some come with a few more of the niceties."

The Life and Death children swarm about the coffins--peer into them, peer under them. They improvise hide-and-seek games around the larger caskets. A small casket with a closed lid rests on the floor. They straddle it like a hobby horse.

One boy checks the price tag on his favorite model: "Wow, $5,700! Pure bronze.

I'm going to buy that for my dad." In a corridor outside, a fair young man with a mustache, soldierly erect in his three-piece gray suit, has been guarding a door.

On their way to view the caskets the Life and Death children, with infinite distaste for closed doors, ask the young man, "What's in there? Can we go in?"

It's currently occupied," he answers, I with a broad wink. Now the moment has come. Nobody has to go into the room, Mrs. Shaak reminds her excited pupils.

Nobody has to go anywhere or do anything he or she doesn't choose to.

At last the closed door is opened. By twos and threes the children march across the threshold as if entering the next life.

A widow who died in a nursing home two days earlier lies before them in an open casket, gowned in a dress provided by the funeral home, her gray curls coiffed. Some mouths arrange themselves in solemn expressions. Some quiver, then crack into nervous conspiratorial grins. But when their turn comes, all the visitors head to ward the corpse--an irresistible force confronting an immovable object.

Unwrinkled faces bend close to stare at folded, gnarled hands, at the sunken face. How much suffering takes place in 72 years! How much of that can a ten-year-old child understand? A question for Henry James or William Golding, with the answer buried deep between the lines of The Turn of the Screw or Lord of the Flies. Ten-year-olds have other questions.

"Why does she have a mustache?"

"Will she be buried with her glasses?"

"What did she die of?"

"Natural causes," Mickey answers.

"Some people just get old and wear out."

Afterward, in the driveway, the boys crawl into the back of the hearse where the old woman's body will ride. One of them asks Mickey a final question: "Can we have a ride in the Hertz?"

Everybody cracks up.

At the end of a long day, on the drive back to school, the girls sing duets from Annie while the boys try to pull their hair.

Death, where is thy sting? Not in Gainesville, Fla.

--Melvin Maddocks

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