“Love and Loss in Literature and Life”, State University of New York at Albany
All their lives, Jeffrey Berman says, he and his wife were worriers. They worried about their kids, they worried about their jobs, they worried about the dangers of the world.
“Nothing that my wife or I ever worried about came true,” says Mr. Berman, a professor of English. “In Barbara’s case, it’s what we did not worry about — namely, pancreatic cancer — that came true.”
The death of his wife in 2004 devastated Mr. Berman. To deal with the loss, he decided to share his grief with students in a classroom. The course — which was influenced by Mr. Berman’s recent book, Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning (State University of New York Press, 2007) — looks at mourning in literature. Students read the Book of Job, Wuthering Heights, and A Farewell to Arms. They write about the death of loved ones and even their own deaths.
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