Education: Thanatology 1

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Even the professors are sometimes drawn to the subject for personal reasons—Fulton because of the death of a younger brother in a traffic accident, Leviton by his father's reverence for life, so extreme that he once shed tears over the death of a pet white rat. "People use the hypothetical fact of their own death to more fully evaluate the life they have been living," says Psychologist Robert Kastenbaum of the University of Massachusetts. "It's the limit, something that defines and finishes what has gone before. I have found that a clear consciousness of death has made my life more precious to me moment by moment." Or as Cincinnati's Professor Venus W. Bluestein puts it, "One becomes less concerned with getting the housecleaning done."

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