High School Class Faces Up to the Many Faces of Death

At a time when high school students are just learning about life, Martha L. Durham is talking to them about death. Death, says Durham, is “part of life,” and her class at Los Alamitos High School is not a morbid academic exercise. Rather, it is a lively give-and-take of ideas about major losses such as as divorce, separation and bankruptcy, “which represent other forms of death,” Durham said.

Laurie Serwinski, 17, a senior, described it this way: “Death doesn’t always have to be about breathing. It can be a termination of a relationship.”

To Durham, a 17-year veteran at the school and Orange County Teacher of the Year in 1979, the course is her way of “trying to teach young people to enjoy life and not fear death by learning how to help themselves and others, especially in times of difficulty.”

Durham said her own losses--the death of her twin daughters one week after birth, her parents’ deaths and a divorce--helped her to write the course as well as to prepare her to teach the class.

Her message, she said, holds fast to “fulfilling potential.”

“We live with death around us, so I want them to get the most enjoyment out of living by learning to express their fears,” said Durham, who still speaks with the Louisiana accent she carried West. “Young people often have been afraid to use the word death, but it’s all around them in different forms.” The class, which has become one of the more popular electives at the school, “wasn’t what I thought it was going to be,” said Pattie Garcia, 16, a junior. “I thought it was going to be about dead people, but what we’re really doing is talking about life.”

Matt McTann, 16, a junior, said, “I thought it was going to be about ghosts.”

Rather, the class is about the medical, psychological and social problems associated with death or loss. At times, Durham urges students to “share music or poetry which reflects the theme of death,” as a lead-in to discussions of serious losses in different forms.

The class was offered to high school juniors and seniors four years ago. Because of demand, four sessions are now being offered, twice that offered last year. Durham teaches two of them in addition to her regular English classes.

It is, she said, the only high school-level thanatology (study of death) class she has ever heard of.

Dr. I. Lee Gislason, a child psychiatrist at UCI Medical Center, said it is “an illusion that children have to be completely protected from discussion of death. They’re thinking about it even before kindergarten.”

Beside class discussions, a host of speakers from various disciplines such as coroner, policeman, paramedic, divorce attorney, priest, funeral director and cemetery official have addressed each class of about 30 students.

The class also takes field trips to such places as a cemetery and a courthouse.

“Learning how to deal with a loss,” said Carol Montgomery, hospice director at Los Alamitos Medical Center, who spoke to the class, “is part of our coping mechanism. We can’t ignore how we feel although society tends to hide its feelings.”

She said the class “brings an awareness that death is part of life,” the major factor in the development and acceptance of hospice programs.

Durham’s students made Christmas cards, collected money and donated pointsettias during the holidays for the Los Alamitos hospice program, which deals with life-threatening illnesses, especially cancer. How long the class will continue to be offered, according to Assistant Principal Neil McKinnon, depends in large part on the mood of the community.

“For a period of time, electives were high-priority items,” he said, “but more recently in some school districts, there is a swing back to standard courses.”

He said Los Alamitos currently offers about 12 electives.