Tales from the Crypt
CBC Radio | Posted: January 31, 2014 5:00 AM | Last Updated: January 31, 2014
Season 19: Episode 22
The poet John Donne called death 'mighty and dreadful.' We can think of a few other names, courtesy of the people who work with it, study it and live with it. Dealing with death: featuring the least morbid bunch of guests you can imagine.For more on this episode and the guests...
Norma Bowe teaches a course affectionately known as The Death Class. Students in Bowe's college classroom in New Jersey visit funeral parlours, take field-trips to cemeteries, and they stand by while pathologists perform autopsies. (Well, some of them stand by. Others have been known to pass out.)
The class is called Death in Perspective - and there's a three-year waiting list to get into it.
Later on the show, Tapestry producer Diane Eros brings us Jerome's Bowl, a documentary about a young man's unusual dying wish and his sister's quest to fulfill it.
What Jerome asked for in this letter required Rochelle Gilchrist to find a ceramic potter who wasn't afraid of the dead:
Below, photos of Jerome, of the pottery, and of his partner, Scott, releasing the bowl into the water as a last goodbye:
Finally, Sheri Booker spent most of her teenage years working at a funeral home. She went on to become poet, teacher, and spoken-word artist. But the business - the funeral business - is still in her blood. Sheri's memoir about life among mourners, corpses and undertakers is called Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner-City Funeral Home.