23 Let’s Put the Fun Back in Funeral: Learning to Affirm Life Over Death
by Madison Hesse
** Content Warning: This piece intimately discusses issues surrounding death **
I can tell from the way my grandmother darts her eyes when walking past her living room that she never wants to step foot inside it again. My guess is that when she stares for too long at the faux leather rocking chair nestled in its corner, she is transported to the same vivid moment as I am in which she, my mother, and I frantically resuscitated her husband as he sat unresponsive in that very chair. Taking turns pounding rhythmically on his chest, clutching his limp hands, and pleading with cracked voices that he take a breath because the paramedics would be here any second, we staved off death that night. Approximately 12 hours later, it ceased to be a topic of discussion. Three generations of freshly terrified women now sit alone with concealed grief, refusing to acknowledge the event except for the occasional involuntary shudder at the sight of that rocking chair. The three of us will probably never discuss how even though no one died in that room, the air inside it moves with a heaviness of death– the same heaviness that is becoming more and more familiar as other larger tragedies unfold all around us. Our silence surrounding this heaviness reminds me that my family, and probably millions families similar to mind, are not empowered to open ourselves to grief in a way which invites love. We are not equipped to courageously acquaint ourselves with death.
I blame our death-worshipping nation, and specifically its media platforms, for normalizing this behavior. My pedagogy, a one which aims to affirm life through loving hopefulness, thus must first consider death as it is weaponized against the project of education. The worship of death, or necrophilia, which bell hooks elaborates on in a number of her works, involves an anti-human ideology which affirms violence for the sake of personal gain and, consequently, scoffs at humaneness. As has been blatantly obvious over the course of the past year, the United States has mastered this art of necrophilia. Hooks recognized this fatal flaw all the way back in 1999 in her book All About Love: New Visions, where she notes that:
Cultures of domination court death. Hence the ongoing fascination with violence, the false insistence that it is natural for the strong to prey upon the weak, for the more powerful to prey upon the powerless. In our culture the worship of death is so intense it stands in the way of love. (hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 191)
Though it may seem only tangentially related at first, my personal experience with an inability to confront the fear of death shamelessly with love is but one example of the influence a death-worshipping nation has on its people. The dominator nation, through this “false insistence” she refers to, makes a pointed effort to condition the masses to become apathetic necrophiliacs, just desensitized enough to death to fear dying without questioning its role in subjugating them to a culture of oppression. Accomplishing this on such a large scale requires constant yet furtive messaging to reinforce that hatred and fear are acceptable, and that “embracing a love ethic” is unnecessary (hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 193). Mass media, thus, becomes the water which seeds of an imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (IWSCP) use to grow and thrive.
When BREAKING NEWS headlines flash graphically cut video footage of school shootings across the screen, the program’s producers anticipate that it will not captivate us for more than a few minutes. They know that as long as these events continue to take place on a weekly basis without being addressed by any serious policy reform, Americans will run out of space to hold for them as tragedies. When dominator culture makes TV “specials” out of topics like the disproportionate effects of Coronavirus on marginalized communities or promotes captivating court case coverage for trials of crimes against black individuals by the police, it actively promotes that maintaining structures of power is more important than deconstructing the IWSCP. American media conditions the masses to view issues of injustice as entertainment; this leads to either performative activism or no activism at all. It distracts from the heaviness so we can avoid fully processing the severity of the situation. It provides us with simple yet harmful concepts to focus on, like an “us/them binary” which pretends that our individual safety is under a direct threat of harm by groups different from ourselves. Again, this only instills fear and allows for the uncontested death of people or groups who are easily written off as potentially “dangerous” because it is less personal – less heavy. It is a type of force feeding – a shoving of tragedy down our throats – lest we have time to chew, swallow, and digest things one at a time. The entirety of this system contributes to active necrophilia, and it runs rampant in the social media which is raising a new generation of students.
Even among a population of very informed and engaged young people, the warping of current events by media outlets and by our nation’s leaders is enough to cause paralyzing confusion. I, as well as most of my young adult friends, grapple with whether or not we should trust any charismatic politicians who preach that they hold humanity as a priority, while they simultaneously line their pockets with the profits of fear, violence, and hatred. We feel deeply “touched by a death-dealing cynicism that normalizes violence, that makes war and tells us peace is not possible” (hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 11). How can we celebrate life when optimism for our chronically dissatisfying futures seems so foolish? How can we embrace death with courage so that we can live more fully? I hold the belief that these goals – these aims central to a self-actualized pedagogy of hope – can be feasibly reached through an education which challenges the worship of death both inside and outside the classroom.
And yet, this type of education informed by current events remains widely unavailable for students entering adulthood. Teenagers repeatedly hear contradictory messages from adults that either current events do not yet concern them or, on the other extreme, that they ought to be intimately informed of social issues that will be their generation’s problem one day. As they approach voting age, and thus take up the moral responsibility to make educated decisions about these issues, little to no training is provided for how to cope with the death and tragedy they will now have to analyze. Climate crisis on Monday, FAFSA form due Tuesday, humanitarian crisis on Wednesday… and it is expected that they be juggled equally as well across those with varying marginalized aspects to their identities. This transition period to adulthood and especially to higher education is ludicrously rushed and lacking in adjacent support systems. Our IWSCP takes advantage of this, using panic to instill shame and thus keep young people complicit in the active necrophilia around them. After considering what I desire most for students to leave my class with, I now know that my goal is for students to feel a hopefulness rooted in themselves as they reject this exact sort of cultural necrophilia. Fittingly, an educational experience that I feel works towards their liberation from this oppression would be centered around current events. It would, hopefully, empower students to use the classroom space for nonjudgmental dialogue about the news, thereby giving them the agency to learn and to love when surrounded by death.
In an effort to learn from an accomplished, justice-seeking educator how to best approach both mass media and current events in the classroom and to accomplish my classroom goals, I turned to Dr. Oluwatomisin Oredein. An expert in trauma-informed pedagogies, she captures precisely what I mean when saying that empowering students to affirm love requires teaching them how to cope with death:
I try to allow current events to impact the rhythm of my class. Students do better allowing what is on their hearts and minds to enter into classroom space—a space of “practicing” sharpening voice—than not. In allowing current events to take up the room they deserve, I am demonstrating that everybody in the class, myself included, will be treated justly and humanely. I am naming that whatever affects one group is important enough to recognize and sort through. (Oredein)
A passionate and humane community of learners thus forms the foundation for this ideal classroom. As the inspiring Dr. Oredein continues to explain in this article of hers on liberative approaches to education, “Pedagogy is not a decision, but that which spills forth from us.” It is character-reflexive and thus obliges that we provide the tools student need to self-actualize and become philosophers of their own educations in the context of the world around them. When overwhelmed with dread about the state of the world and lacking medical notes which excuse them for these limit situations, students need to feel safe enough to show up for learning in whatever capacity they are able. As an educator, perhaps the easiest way to contribute to a cycle of trauma is to consciously ignore these limit situations by leaving what is happening in the world at the front door of the classroom. Asking students to be present for course material with their full selves while shutting out the events making them feel unsafe or emotionally paralyzed only perpetuates the message that we should channel energy into distracting ourselves by consuming content or media at an alarmingly rapid rate. Getting through a certain amount of course material should never be prioritized above pouring out love for those in pain. Though the addiction to death in our society “consumes energy that could be given to the art of loving,” a classroom should raise a middle finger to this societal norm and always choose love (hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 192). It should always choose living fully and living justly.
In order to create an environment in which students feel they have agency over their experiences, physical bodies, and personhoods, a divorce from the traditional markings of white Western intellect is necessary. Especially in a world overflowing with trauma, no student should be required to silence their voice or sacrifice their personhood for the sake of conforming to classroom etiquette. After all, asking students to compromise themselves is a form of intellectual suicide, and is directly adjacent to the death-affirming values we intend to liberate ourselves from. For this reason, I envision the seminar for young adults taking place in an environment with power dynamics foreign to the traditional classroom. Ideally, this location would be intimately entwined with the heaviness of death so that students have a constant awareness of its transformative power. This ideal location, then, is one in which the immediate threat of death is so prevalent that it dictates life: a prison. A few such programs already exist in which young adults travel to prisons to engage in dialogue with incarcerated individuals. Within the Claremont Colleges, courses like Pomona’s “Prison, Punishment, Redemption” or national experiential programs like the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program have recently increased in popularity, and for good reason. I imagine that placing a group of newly graduated high school seniors or college freshmen into a prison for workshops with inmates immensely different from themselves would truly be a life-altering opportunity for growth. That type of dynamic, integrated learning environment has the potential to turn a space usually occupied by neglect and isolation into one which facilitates productive conversation and a restoration of humanity. In an article published by Scripps College student Emily Diamond, Hicks Peterson, a director at Pitzer College, even reflected that:
Through this program, the inside students are seen as scholars who have contributing powers and intellectual worth. For the outside students, there is a freedom that comes in the oddest of places, in the least free place, because a lot of the pretense that is found in Claremont classrooms is dropped inside (Diamond).
A program like this, with a special focus on current events, would simultaneously encourage young adults to rethink the criminal justice system and the narratives surrounding incarcerated individuals, but would also lead to their own liberation from the worship of death. I find it both ironic and beautiful that “the least free place” is where we might most courageously find freedom through education. Indeed, as Dan Berger writes in his book Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, death in prison becomes “a generative force” which unites humans under the enduring power of knowledge (142). Inmates show up to learn not in spite of death, but because death holds the power to enhance moments of educative liberation. These inmates and outside students, collaborating to affirm life, could thus empower each other to challenge everything the IWSCP stands for.
I envision tens of thousands of students sharing in this experience. Whether funded by the government or by non-profit agencies, this opportunity for self-actualization, community healing, and system reform ought to be extended to many more students than just those in elite, highly funded institutions. More and more each day I choose to believe in this program, and in the aim of empowering young adults to cope with death’s heaviness in our violent world. The skeleton for my educational experience thus begins to find its form under that umbrella term of a “pedagogy of hope” which I found so elusive a few months ago.
Abandoning the notion that hope must always be the stepbrother to optimism, and allowing hope to meet me where I am, I can contextualize my pedagogy in terms of a gloomy outlook. In fact, this pedagogy allows all of us to meet it wherever we are, pessimistically if you are like me, and to still feel purpose within our sorrow. With it, we can mourn the state of our nation, of our own uncertainty, and especially of things dying while never losing sight of a justice-seeking love ethic. We can truly listen to bell hooks when she tells us that “Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living” (hooks, All About Love: New Visions, 176). And finally, we can rest, releasing the tension in our shoulders and accepting that despite the things we have no control over, we can persist on our paths towards living fully. We can persist towards learning ourselves.
Works Cited
Berger, Dan. “The Pedagogy of the Prison.” Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Justice, Power, and Politics), Illustrated, University of North Carolina Press, 2016, pp. 139–76. The Claremont Colleges Library, heinonline-org.ccl.idm.oclc.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.slavery/uncaaao0001&id=159&collection=slavery&index=slavery/uncaaao.
Diamond, Emily. “Pathway to Resistance: Claremont Students Learn Alongside Incarcerated Students.” Scripps College News, 19 June 2019, www.scrippscollege.edu/news/releases/students/pathway-to-resistance-claremont-students-learn-alongside-incarcerated-students.
Hooks, Bell. All About Love: New Visions. 765th ed., William Morrow Paperbacks, 2018, wtf.tw/ref/hooks.pdf.
Hooks, Bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. 1st ed., Routledge, 2003, thecheapestuniversity.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/bell-hooks-teaching-community-a-pedagogy-of-hope.pdf.
Oredein, Oluwatomisin. “We Have to Tell the Truth: A Liberative Approach to Trauma-Informed Pedagogy.” Spotlight on Teaching, Religious Studies News, 9 Mar. 2021, rsn.aarweb.org/spotlight-on/teaching/trauma-informed-pedagogies/we-have-tell-truth-liberative-approach-trauma-informed-pedagogy.