About 20 minutes outside Gainesville, Fla., stands an old country cemetery.
A motorist compelled by the urgent and forgettable business that seems to possess most people behind steering wheels could speed right past the six acres of oak ridge plots, as oblivious as a sinner out of Pilgrim's Progress. But if the wayfarer is inspired to take a sideways look, on certain balmy days he may glimpse a scene as astonishing as any vision by John Bunyan.
Under the live oaks, draped with Spanish moss, a small band of nine-and ten-year-olds scramble among the tombstones with the quick casual grace of children playing games in their own familiar schoolyard. In the midst of death—to reverse the proverb—there is life. And what life. Life in yellow T shirts with maroon-letter messages like "Whereinthehell is Gainesville, Fla.?" Life, chewing sugarless grape gum with great juicy smacks. Life about as far from death as life can get.
For Judith Shaak—the dark-haired young woman a little off to one side, whose restless, measuring eyes say teacher—this exuberant encounter between the very living and the very dead is no random happening. The little girls chasing lizards around the sandy grave of Madison Starke Perry (1814-1865), the fourth Governor of Florida, and the boys swigging Coke while making tombstone rubbings with brilliant red crayons are members of the Enrichment Class for Life and Death at the Myra Terwilliger Elementary School, now in session. And Mrs. Shaak—in her third year of leading dry runs through the Valley of the Shadow—could not be more pleased by what she sees.
Near the tombstone inscribed "Our Mammy," Christa Barker kneels to examine the seashells heaped as decoration above one or two graves. Martha Hale jumps up and down, shouting "Isn't he darling?"—summoning everybody to the sculptured dog that stands on guard at the front and center of a family plot. Wylie Cohn picks out a weather-blackened stone engraved with the two words: "Not Dead." Sucking his breath in a whistle, Wylie says, "He really didn't want to die."
Strolling along a row like a window shopper on a summer day, Kevin Johnson stumbles across a coincidence much to his liking. Pointing to the first name on a marker, he commands Martha Hale: "Lay down, Martha. You're dead." The joke, Martha decides, is meant kindly, and she joins in the laughter that scatters over the scene like the sunbeams through the moss-fringed trees.
Death, Arnold Toynbee once said, is unAmerican. But not today. Death-education courses now abound all over the country for college, high school and elementary students. Their philosophy parallels the one that is used to justify sex education courses—talk about a subject that has been nearly taboo, and therefore mysterious and frightening, and everybody will probably feel better. One of the standard texts, by Gene Stanford and Deborah Perry, is even called Death Out of the Closet. The gifted fourth-and fifth-graders, mostly with IQs above 125, who make up Mrs. Shaak's little flock are simply dragging the dark angel into the Florida sunlight and making death almost ordinary.