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The Terwilliger School used to lie across the street from pasture land. Times change. Now grazing cows have been replaced by a Burger King. Mrs. Shaak's Life and Death classroom at first looks like just another concrete-and-glass modular unit of 1970s education. Scrawled student papers cover the walls, but they are not quite the usual exercises. On a sort of bulletin board the children have posted their own epitaphs inside crudely drawn tombstones. Nicole Carpenter writes:
Here lies Nicole
Who fell in a hole.
Without a doubt She could not get out.
Dan Smith's inscription reads:
Here lies Dan.
He was hit by a van
When living in Japan.
At the front of the room self-composed obituaries are displayed: "Alec Tilley died at the age of 87. He died of old age at his own home . . . Remembered for great playing in sports. Send flowers. . ."
A charmingly unassuming but determined woman, Mrs. Shaak coaxes doctors to visit the Life and Death class. The relentless children ask them:
"How do you tell someone they're going to die?"
"Is there really a spirit?"
One earnest bad speller asks in writing: "How do you preform and octopsy?"
Lawyers advise the class how to write a will, and each child does. A girl stipulates: "I leave my bed to my second cousin Millie." A boy's will: "My puppy to Tim. Fonz helmet to Tom." Out of who knows what urge one willmaker allots his comic books to his brother but specifies:
"My horn, my stick and rope to be put in my casket with me."
Games are played ("You have just been informed that you have only one year to live . . ."). Life and death questionnaires are submitted to each class.
Sample question: "What happens when people and animals die?" Sample answer:
"Everything is sad and not very active."
Mrs. Shaak wrote her master's thesis on the way children's books deal with death. She discovered a "grandfather's gone on a long trip" evasiveness. Her charges read books like A Taste of Blackberries, in which a child dies of bee stings.
They see films like Annie and the Old One, in which a Navajo girl learns to accept—big word—her grandmother's dying.
The fancy is stretched to imagine life's last event by every device of art, by every technique of simulation. Yet finally nothing will do but to meet death face to face. It is time for the ultimate field trip. Station wagons and minibuses piloted by volunteer mothers head out for the Williams-Thomas Funeral Home.
If funeral directors are expected to be lank, lugubrious, waxen creatures like their customers, Mickey Milam, a smiling cherub of a man, provides the perfect antistereotype. In the Chapel of the Chimes, flanked by potted palms and backed by taped music, Mickey delivers his stand-up speech on the history, evolution, and utter necessity of the funeral home professional. Who else knows just how to suture the lips shut? Who else knows just where to make the incision so "you're gonna get your best drainage?"