These Classes Are Near-Death Experiences, and That ’s a Good Thing

Spirits are high as the students file into the basement of the Galante Funeral Home in Union, N.J., to pick out their caskets. Jessica Polynice, 23, beelines toward the most ornate one in the showroom, joking that she has expensive taste. Others consider the prominently displayed price tags, from $995 to nearly $6,000, and factor in the softness of the pillows. Surrounded by open caskets, Amanda Davis, 20, says she’d rather be cremated into a firework. Beside her, Lauren Duffy, 24, flips through a brochure for artificial reef cremations and weighs whether she’d like to be eternally memorialized on the ocean floor. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The decisions, largely hypothetical, are all part of their next homework assignment to plan their own funerals, presumably for the very far future. They’re among 60 students taking Kean University’s Death in Perspective course this semester, which is one of the many college classes on death and dying in the U.S. that have grown in popularity during the pandemic. And it’s become much more of a grief-support group, professor Norma Bowe says, which is why the field trip to the funeral home starts off lighthearted but ends in tears. Read more: Death Doulas Used to Be Rare. The COVID-19 Pandemic Changed That <strong>“We study dying to know how to live.”</strong>In the last 30 minutes, grief that was well hidden in the funeral home basement pours out of the students in the s...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 feature nationpod Source Type: news