Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION: “Life Lessons”
PART 1: Diaries
CHAPTER 1—Week One
“Nervous Undergraduates Avoiding Eye Contact”
CHAPTER 2—Week Two
“Hearing It Made His Death More Real”
CHAPTER 3—Week Three
“She Helped Me Say What I Could Not Say Myself”
CHAPTER 4—Week Four
“There’s Too Much Covering Up of Grief in America”
CHAPTER 5—Week Five
“We’re Going to Die”
CHAPTER 6—Week Six
“Thinking Like a Writer”
CHAPTER 7—Week Seven
“I’m Sorry, I Understand”
CHAPTER 8—Week Eight
“Sometimes I Feel Like an Outsider in This Class”
CHAPTER 9—Week Nine
“I Felt As If I Were Reliving that Day”
CHAPTER 10—Week Ten
“There Is No Preparation for a Sight of Death”
CHAPTER 11—Week Eleven
“I Love You Too Much”
CHAPTER 12—Week Twelve
“We’re Taking Risks in a Safe Place”
CHAPTER 13—Week Thirteen
“Write As If You Were Dying”
CHAPTER 14—Week Fourteen
“I Used to Cry in the Middle of the Night and Contemplate Suicide”
CHAPTER 15—Week Fifteen
“I Am Not Alone in This Battle”
PART 2: Breakthroughs
CHAPTER 16—Chipo
“I Have to Turn My Shattered Reality into a Livable Dream”
CHAPTER 17—Lia
“Instead of Minimizing My Struggles, I Wrote about Them”
CHAPTER 18—Shannon
“It’s Hard for Me to Express Emotion”
CHAPTER 19—Faith
“If I Could Not Write, I Would Not Survive”
CHAPTER 20—Anonymous
“I Will Always Remember My Unborn Baby”
Conclusion: Reading Dying to Teach
Appendix: Syllabus for English 450: Writing about Love and Loss
References
Student Writers
Index
Biography
Berman, Jeffrey
