Book Review: The Death Class: A True Story About Life

I love libraries. Lately, I have been spending more time there, looking through the shelves to see what works in the cover, title, subjects…what sells a book to a reader? And then, to lots of readers? Although I was mainly looking for prescriptive nonfiction about performing arts, creativity, performance anxiety, etc. this book compelled me to take it off the shelf and read through the first few pages. Why? I don’t know. I was hooked by the book opening with the author remembering her high school classmate being shot by an abusive ex-boyfriend. But I put the book back to the shelf. It was not relevant to my own book writing. So, I was surprised when few weeks later, I was still pulled by the book and took it out to read, and finish, it in a few days.

The pull I felt toward The Death Class may have been partially because of the last book I finished last year, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, a book recommended to me by a friend, a palliative care doctor. We were among the group of travelers to Bhutan, soul searching.

My personal interest in death is related to my mission to promote music as a healing agent. I wonder if our society does not overvalue health and longevity. If physical strength and longevity became our life’s goal, then we are bound to lose at the end, when we inevitably become weaker and eventually die. Promotion of music, arts and creativity can counteract this value system. Music defies time. It can alter our sense of our lives as a linear narrative. It adds another dimension to our senses and perspective. Even if we were destined to die in the next hour, beauty can help us celebrate that hour.

So, I am interested in what death is, and how people tend to think of, and deal with, death. Both of these books satisfied my curiosity from different angles.

Being Mortal is written by a medical doctor, and a son whose personal account of his father’s illness and eventual death takes up the latter half of the book. The experience forces him to reflect on his own practice of medicine, and his relationships with his patients. He realizes that doctors don’t want to be “good” at their crafts, and often end up prioritizing preserving their confidence at the expense of patient’s human integrity and personal choice. The first half of the book chronicles the development of medicine and how that has effected the process of aging and death. And he proposes that although we have seen progress over centuries, we can do better yet. He gives us examples of nursing homes treating their elders with respect for their dignity and independence. How postponement of death at the expense of quality of life is not what medicine should be about. Quality of life is different for each person, and caregivers, the hospital staff as well as the family members, should prioritize discovering what the patient thinks of as essential to his/her own identity, what makes his/her life worth living.

The Death Class is about Norma Bowe, a nurse and a professor at Kean University in Union, NJ. Her class, “Death and Perspective” has a three-year waiting list. She takes her students to morgue, death-row prison, cemeteries, funeral homes. The class considers dying, death and bereavement, but it results in their students reflecting on their own experiences with death. Many students have had experiences of death among family and friends around them with gang violence, drugs, mental illness, etc. Norma forms personal relationships with them, counseling and rescuing many of them. The author, a journalist, takes Norma’s class for a semester, and shadows Norma as he deals with her students issues. While the parts of the book that dealt with the content of Norma’s class was informative, the personal struggles we learn of the students felt a bit uncomfortable. They were there to explain how the content of the class was so pertinent to the students, and how the opportunity to converse with death row inmates and funeral home staff gave them perspective on their own struggles. However, it felt more gossipy. I felt almost guilty wanting to read on. It may have been my guilty conscience about my social privileges over their lack thereof. And to have Norma’s troubled childhood revealed as the driving force of her tireless rescue efforts was also troubling. The book is a page turner – the hook is strong. But I do not wish to write a book like this. The success of the book rests on the exploitation of people’s struggles.

The balance between human stories and information is tricky. Stories make lessons easier to relate to, to remember. However, how to tell the story can overwhelm the information that you want to convey. In this sense Being Mortal was more successful than The Death Class, although the latter had a stronger hook and a pull to bring the reader to the end of the book.

And in terms of the topic of death – both of them assured me further in my own conviction about the quality of life over physical strength and longevity, and my mission to promote music as a healing agent. Music can defy death and suffering, even if the defiance is ephemeral.

The difference between the two books may be how fearlessly honest you are, as an author. Gawande, in his Mortal Being confess to his shortcomings as a doctor, things he regrets in his miscommunication with patients, and his skepticism about the culture of medicine, his chosen field. He bears himself vulnerable throughout the course of the book. On the other hand, while Hayasaki does reveal her own traumatic encounter with deaths as a high school student, and later as a reporter to Oklahoma bombing, etc. she mainly hides behind Norma and her struggles with her own past and her students. Hayasaki is present in the book as a narrator but as an interviewer, freely giving the readers her emotional reactions and observations. But she never is a part of the action. That’s why she can, at times, feel to me like she is judging from a safe distance.

Honesty, vulnerability, and information explained through stories. Lessons learned.