The Death Class Quotes

“It’s good to be alive, right?” the professor often told her students . . . “Did you notice how fragile we are? We have no business taking our lives for granted.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“If you can look back at your entire life and at the end of the day and say, ‘You know? My life was good. I’m pleased with how it all turned out . . . and if I could do it all over again, I’d be happy to’—those people have integrity,” Norma told her students.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“So Norma’s message was that happiness takes hard work. It should be approached like a series of homework assignments.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“As she explained to her students, patients often awoke from very bad illnesses or cardiac arrests, talking about how they had been floating over their bodies. “Mm-hmmm,” Norma would reply, sometimes thinking, Yeah, yeah, I know, you were on the ceiling. Such stories were recounted so frequently that they hardly jolted medical personnel. Norma at the time had mostly chalked it up to some kind of drug reaction or brain malfunction, something like that. “No, really,” said a woman who’d recently come out of a coma. “I can prove it.” The woman had been in a car accident and been pronounced dead on arrival when she was brought into the emergency room. Medical students and interns had begun working on her and managed to get her heartbeat going, but then she had coded again. They’d kept on trying, jump-starting her heart again, this time stabilizing it. She’d remained in a coma for months, unresponsive. Then one day she awoke, talking about the brilliant light and how she remembered floating over her body. Norma thought she could have been dreaming about all kinds of things in those months when she was unconscious. But the woman told them she had obsessive-compulsive disorder and had a habit of memorizing numbers. While she was floating above her body, she had read the serial number on top of the respirator machine. And she remembered it. Norma looked at the machine. It was big and clunky, and this one stood about seven feet high. There was no way to see on top of the machine without a stepladder. “Okay, what’s the number?” Another nurse took out a piece of paper to jot it down. The woman rattled off twelve digits. A few days later, the nurses called maintenance to take the ventilator machine out of the room. The woman had recovered so well, she no longer needed it. When the worker arrived, the nurses asked if he wouldn’t mind climbing to the top to see if there was a serial number up there. He gave them a puzzled look and grabbed his ladder. When he made it up there, he told them that indeed there was a serial number. The nurses looked at each other. Could he read it to them? Norma watched him brush off a layer of dust to get a better look. He read the number. It was twelve digits long: the exact number that the woman had recited. The professor would later come to find out that her patient’s story was not unique. One of Norma’s colleagues at the University of Virginia Medical Center at the time, Dr. Raymond Moody, had published a book in 1975 called Life After Life, for which he had conducted the first large-scale study of people who had been declared clinically dead and been revived, interviewing 150 people from across the country. Some had been gone for as long as twenty minutes with no brain waves or pulse. In her lectures, Norma sometimes shared pieces of his research with her own students. Since Moody had begun looking into the near-death experiences, researchers from around the world had collected data on thousands and thousands of people who had gone through them—children, the blind, and people of all belief systems and cultures—publishing the findings in medical and research journals and books. Still, no one has been able to definitively account for the common experience all of Moody’s interviewees described. The inevitable question always followed: Is there life after death? Everyone had to answer that question based on his or her own beliefs, the professor said. For some of her students, that absence of scientific evidence of an afterlife did little to change their feelings about their faith. For others,”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“Each stage of life is filled with unique challenges, but the ways in which each person learns to survive, according to Erikson, create character.
Sometimes these lessons needed to be examined beyond textbooks, in the lives and life cycles of everyday people.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“Norma Bowe often said she believed there was a wonder in unleashing your story, horrible as it might be, out into the world. She told her students that speaking it aloud releases a different kind of power from writing it down on paper or typing it on a computer screen. Give it voice, and you never know what kind of gift might find its way back in return.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“There was no denying it: life’s edges brimmed with misery and cruelty. No wonder people often concluded that the dead were better off.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“. . . fear of death makes us want to engage in activities that render us unique, allowing us to reach a level of putative immortality. Death anxiety, Becker believes, is the powerful undercurrent stirring human behavior.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“The inevitable question always followed: Is there life after death?
Everyone had to answer that question based on his or her own beliefs, the professor said. For some of her students, that absence of scientific evidence of an afterlife did little to change their feelings about their faith. For others, it put that much more pressure on this life.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“She believed cemeteries held the stories that history books could not always document; they were the overlooked, underused classrooms beneath our feet . . .”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“this time.” She is thriving in her new career as a middle school”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“Mohandas Gandhi read: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“ADULTHOOD, NORMA BELIEVED, is about giving back and passing lessons on to the next generation, so that the virtues you work so hard to develop live on even after your death.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life

“Norma would witness many more deaths of all varieties, but she never forgot that first one, its serenity, its peacefulness.”
― Erika Hayasaki, The Death Class: A True Story About Life