What comes after?

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, my AP Language and Composition class read the poem "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant. We are studying transcendentalism; you know, the Emerson and Thoreau stuff? Trust your gut instinct, your sense beyond your senses, your natural inclinations.

The poem is a "meditation on death." Some students were not thrilled about the topic, but I assured them that transcendentalists have a positive outlook on death, so it wouldn't be too depressing.

So, they read it stanza by stanza in groups and wrote down what they thought he was saying. They did a keen job interpreting Bryant's "cycle of life" attitude that we are all part of nature, and when we die we just take a different form so we can feed other living things, like oak trees. (Yuck, they said.) They saw that he was advising comfort in death because it is something everyone experiences, and there is an equality in it, with no preferences given to wealth, race, or gender, kind of like when you join the armed forces. And, in death we are not alone because we have been preceded by many; in fact, more people have died, than are now living. (I'm not sure if that's true, but that's what he says.) Life for others will go on after we die, and then they too will die: the circle of life, as in "The Lion King."

The last line of the poem states that when death comes we should welcome it, wrap ourselves up in a blanket and lay down for a much-deserved rest.

"What do you think of that last line?" I ask them.

"Well, it's not true---at least not for everyone."

"What do you mean?"

"Some people die horrible deaths, wasting away from cancer and suffering, or being blown up by a bomb in Iraq," one students says.

"Yeah. And sometimes even babies die. They don't need rest. They haven't even had a chance to live."

I tell them about my grandpa who went to bed one night in his own bed and never woke up. He was about 75. Too bad it couldn't be like that for everyone.

This opens up sharing time for death stories. I hadn't realized that that's where this would go. I had intended on ending class with students rewriting The Pledge of Allegiance, putting it into different words, coming up with their own versions, just to be transcendental, thinking outside the box.

But, here we were talking about death. One relates a story about an aunt, another about a cousin.

"This is depressing," some said.

I tell them it is important to talk about it, otherwise no one will ever know what you want when it happens. We talk about the "60 Minutes" segment that told about how many old people lay in hospitals waiting to die, kept alive by machines. In the last three months of their lives, megabucks are spent trying to keep the inevitable from happening.

This leads to me telling them how our son passed away four years ago. It is a sad story, but an important one. I thought I could pull it off with no tears. I couldn't. It wasn't horrible, just a few trickles down the cheeks, but I left them with sadness right before Thanksgiving after telling them that transcendentalists have a positive outlook on death.

I don't know why I chose to share that story; maybe because Thanksgiving was our son's favorite holiday, and he was on my mind. My guess is that even Bryant shed tears over loved ones after tucking them in the blanket and laying them to rest. It's hard to eliminate the "depressing" out of death. The trick is not to let it overwhem you and make the most out of your own life while you're here.

As Robin Williams says in "Dead Poets Society, "Seize the day!"