The Death Parties

My ol' Dad wrote a book entitled "Dimensions of Death" but, unfortunately, he never submitted it for publication.  The book was duplicated at a copy center and this was for used as a reference text in one of his classes.  I'm sorry to report that today there are now no known copies of the book anywhere but it was interesting to see what came of it at the time.

You may wonder what course would require a book like that and he called it Dimensions of Death too.  The purpose of the course was to address misunderstandings about the nature of death.  That which we don't understand is often feared so he set toward increasing understanding, almost certainly his own as well.

The book explored the nature of death and how it was common to everything from animals to stars, everything eventually dies.  He also explored the spiritualism that surrounds it but it wasn't to form any preference for one over another as he wanted to hear what the students thought and he had no interest in telling them what to think.

The course drew students from all over the place.  There was no requirement to be following a curriculum within the Biology Department.  One of those students was Jim Cohn who was one of the most brilliant students he ever had.  He was studying to be a rabbi but he was intrigued by my father's course.

The biggest requirement of the course, as with most of my father's courses, was a term paper.  There was no requirement other than the central theme of some relationship to death.  It didn't matter what you believed, whether Christian, atheist, or wood sprites so long as you defended your position logically.

My paper was entitled "Death as Considered in the Carefully Modulated Limelight of Indifference" and this was the poofiest title I ever used for anything but it was also the best paper I ever wrote.  My father was quite taken with it, so much so that he cut my name off the title page and sent it to some other professors to grade it.  I don't know if he or I was more pleased when it still came back with an A.  But that's not why I'm writing this story.

Every year when he ran the class he would invite those who made it to the end of it to come over to the house for a Death Party.  That might seem morbid and that everyone would come over to lie in coffins to pretend to be vampires but it was nothing of the kind.  It was an excuse to get together with bright people from many different backgrounds and get hammered with them.  He didn't drink much otherwise but he wasn't shy with gin and tonic at these parties and they were a riot.  Some students would show up in costumes and some would not, there was no telling how it would go.

The class only ran for four or five years but the parties became notorious in that time.  It's not that there was wild naked debauchery but there was lots of drinking.  Maybe this hasn't changed but in those days students didn't go to the home of a professor, particularly not to drink, and stories about the parties, with varying levels of accuracy, traveled far.

The Death Parties were nuts but they weren't the craziest ones that ever took place in that house ... but that will be a story for another day.