Confronting Death
November 3, 2008

Memento Mori

"Harken, stranger, as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now so you will be
Prepare thyself to follow me."

This colloquia asked students from Philosophy and American Studies to consider the ways society and individuals confront death and dying.

Two poems lay on the students' chairs as they came in. "Memento Mori", printed above, and "Meditation 8"

The evening began with a panel discussion which provided three different perspectives on the ways people respond to death. Alan Shipiro, a poet and W. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English & Comparative Literature, spoke of his experiences with his brother's death and read several of the poems he wrote from this experience. Aaron Shackelford, a former Emergency Medical Technician and Ph.D. candidate in English, discussed his encounters with the physical aspects of death. Robin Hill, a former hospice nurse, asked the students to imagine their family's response to a terminal disease. Following the presentations, students had the opportunity to ask the panel about their experiences and perspectives on death.

Dinner was served, and during the meal students discussed a list of questions regarding their own views of death in American culture. Along with these prompts, students also found blank legal forms for organ donation and Do Not Rescutitate orders that they were asked to consider filling out.

After dinner, the students watched exercpts from the documentary A Family Undertaking about the home funeral industry. Professors Marr and Preston then led a discussion of the documentary, the legal forms, and their own reflections from dinner.

Meditation 8
Scarce do I pass a day but that I hear
Some one or other's dead, and to my ear
Methinks it is not news. But, oh did I
Think deeply on it, what it is to die,
My pulses all should beat, I should not be
Drowned in this deluge of security.

Philip Paine
(c. 1647-c.1667)
According to Harrison T. Meserole, writing in his definitive American Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (Penn State University Press 1986), “So little is known about Philip Paine that even his first name is in doubt. Among the many Pain[e]s in seventeenth-century New England there appears no Philip on any registry, leaving the possibility that a printer’s error is responsible for the initial “P.” It appears that in 1667 or 1668 Paine ‘suffering Shipwrack was drowned,’ probably in his twentieth year. Beyond these sparse data, Paine’s brief life remains a mystery.”

Courses involved:

AMST 055H  
First Year Seminar: Birth and Death in America  
Professor Timothy Marr  
This course explores birth and death as essential human rites of passage impacted by changing American historical and cultural contexts.  Since both remain defining life events beyond experiential recall, studying them in interdisciplinary ways opens powerful insights into how  culture mediates the construction of bodies and social identity. Readings and assignments are designed to study changing anthropological rituals, medical procedures, scientific technologies, and ethical quandaries. We will also explore a variety of representations of birth and death in literary expression, film, and material culture as well as in hospitals, funeral homes, and cemeteries.

PHIL 078
First Year Seminar: Death
Professor Ryan Preston  
This course will explore the nature and significance of death through classic and contemporary philosophical work, literature, and film. The course will address the following questions: (1) Do people have souls that can survive bodily death? (2) What makes someone’s life go best? (3) Why is death bad for the person who dies? (4) Do our lives have meaning? (5) Does our mortality have any implications for the meaning of our lives?