By University courses have unique personalities. Some of my courses oscillate between combativeness and entertainment; some are laid back and reserved; some are youthful; some courses are weird and oddly conspiratorial, and some, like my Death and Dying courses, are authentic and emotional.
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. The personality of my death and dying courses has taught me a lot, including how to better engage students with the realities of death. In what follows, I reflect on my experiences and showcase some of the creative work produced by my students during the Spring 2024 semester.
Authenticity and Creativity in a University Death and Dying Course
My two online Death and Dying courses are offered by the Society, Culture and Religion program (SCAR). The courses attract hundreds of students from diverse fields and disciplines, including nursing, life sciences, religious studies, anthropology, the hard sciences, and others. Students are introduced to a variety of religious and cultural responses to death, dying, and bereavement, including funerary rituals and practices, models of grief, conceptions of the afterlife, ancestor veneration, social justice, and the ongoing effects of globalization and colonization.
Students have different motivations for enrolling in a Death and Dying course. Some students are working towards a degree in a helping profession and want to learn more about the patients they are likely to encounter. Some, like Kate (not their real name), are actively working through a recent loss:
“I lost someone very significant in my life this year, but I had the privilege to be present in their final moment of life, and it gave me a vulnerable and beautiful insight into death and dying that wasn’t previously there. It’s something I want to lean into, as I disarm my own avoidance of the one thing we all certainly have in common and meet it with dignity and respect, amidst a bit of the fear.”
Some enrol as a personal challenge, hoping to overcome their anxieties. Others are simply looking for an interesting elective. No matter their reasons, the most consistently active, emotional, and intellectually mature students enrol in my Death and Dying courses.
Authenticity
Though the professor and the course material often dictate the classroom experience, the role played by students should not be overlooked. Students are often dealing with their own loss, either before or during the course. Like a Death Café, my course is not a space for grief counselling, but the classroom allows for a degree of authentic reflection on mortality in a society that often shuns it. Death and Dying courses centre students as active participants rather than passive spectators. It reminds students that we cannot keep death at a distance from our Being.
Whether students are discussing their own experiences, sharing stories of trauma (especially post-Oct 7th), or reacting to difficult course material, their vulnerability ends up becoming the most authentic and defining feature of the course. As Historian David M. Parry writes, “Where else but in the classroom can we even aspire to [make the hard discussions possible]?” The topics covered in a Death and Dying classroom should be an invitation to students to step outside the bounds of the appropriate, to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.
Death, Religion, and Politics
Death and Dying courses can be more than a comparative survey of funerary and death customs. On a practical level, death and dying courses provide valuable perspectives for future nurses, hospice workers, funeral directors, and others, beyond the clinical encounter. The Death and Dying classroom can also become a space where our shared humanity is centred, a space that disrupts the notion that politics, religion, and culture are somehow separate domains, or that any two religions have incompatible futures. For example, the shared customs and practices of Jews and Muslims often comes as a surprise to both Jewish and Muslim students.
What values do we want students to walk away with? What questions do we send them out into the world with? If students leave the course with anything beyond greater cultural and religious competence, I hope it is the notion that death is always political. Who dies, how they die, where they die, how and where bodies are interred, and whose bodies are grievable are all questions of belonging and exclusion. Extending political significance to the grave can help reorient students to injustices faced by both the living and the dead.
Creative Work
During the Spring 2024 semester, students were tasked with producing creative work inspired by course themes and their own experiences with death. Students were encouraged to follow their creative instincts, which resulted in paintings, drawings, cooking videos, ancestor offerings, death-inspired restaurant menus, embroidery, music, poetry, photography, bead work, and more.
To properly assess whether students met the course’s learning objectives, they also submitted a three-page reflection that demonstrated clear connections between their work and the course. Here is a sample of the incredible, and heartfelt work produced by the students, described in their own words.
My final project, a drawing titled ‘The Function of Death,’ depicts a soul holding up the world, representing the universal nature of death. This artwork illustrates themes learned in the course, emphasizing that despite cultural differences in mourning, death unites all. The drawing illustrates how shared experiences of grief transcend religious and cultural boundaries, fostering solidarity. In addition, the work depicts the influence the dead continue to have on the living. Through creating this piece, I’ve reflected on how personal losses, grief, and memory shape our lives and connect us across cultures.
– Maanya Sheth
The sculpture represents the different approaches we have taken to human mortality. The side of the hand gripping the vial of blood represents alchemy (originating in Ancient China), and its pull against our natural state of mortality. The other side represents acceptance and peace in death, reflected by a tradition of waiting to die in Varanasi to achieve moksa (breaking the cycle of reincarnation).
– Julia Gard
Witness the serene moment of a body, purified with gold streaks symbolizing Ghusl, being lowered into its grave. The animation features the dua “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un” written above the body, capturing the consistent mindset that Muslims follow: “To Him we belong and indeed, to Him we return”. The profound reverence and simplicity of Islamic burial practices highlights the spiritual journey and communal aspects that underscore the transition from this life to the hereafter.
– Hfsa Awan
Studying death and dying, I was tasked with creating something that connected to the course material. Now it has been an interesting time studying different conceptual frameworks for how individuals cope with knowledge when they or someone they know are faced with death and normalizing death in a world so death denying. I chose to connect my creation to the concept of bare death (to deny personhood to the dead, placing them in a state of exception). I titled this “empty” symbolizing an old photograph found of the many children lost in Residential Schools. I chose the word empty to remind the consumer of the cultural assimilation.”
– Nykolyna Sault
I have always been interested in the 5 stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. This song represents an abstract view of the grieving process, continuing bonds theory, and my own thoughts on grief and what I have learned from this course. I included musical themes of all the stages, but not as linear, isolated, or melancholic as one may expect. I hope to have captured this with a peaceful mood and with overlapping melodies without a clear ending and hope to broaden the opinions on how others might view grief.
– Noreen Altaf
As a student of East African heritage, I created a project inspired by African deathways, specifically the practice of ancestor veneration; this crochet blanket highlights a ritual discussed during a case study in this course on Guinea-Bissau, where the deceased individual is wrapped in a cloth or blanket which they will use to trade in the afterlife. The colors of this blanket represent those worn by the Maasai tribe in Tanzania, my home country. By blending traditional practices with personal heritage, I aimed to honor and connect with my roots through this unique creation.
– Sehr Habib
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