Loss (Gen Ed 1131)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2025

How are we to cope with the inevitability that some of what we most love in life we will lose?

 

Aesthetics & Culture icon with text

Kathleen Coleman

Loss is an inevitable fact of human existence. Small losses most of us learn to bear with equanimity. But enormous, wrenching, life-changing losses open voids in our lives for which we can never feel adequately prepared, even if we can see them coming. This course tries to understand the nature of loss on a physical and emotional level, to give us some framework for coping with it and to help us develop some empathy in those very difficult situations when someone else has faced a loss and we do not know how to react.

Our main focus will be upon the loss of someone “close” to us, through either death or a personality-changing accident or illness (“close” is in quotation marks, because some of these losses may be of public figures whom we have never met personally, but whose loss makes an impact on our entire society). We will compare this form of loss with others, such as loss of country through exile or forced migration and loss of part of oneself through amputation. Our approach will be threefold: we will try to understand the physiological and psychological effects of loss; we will study the rituals that different societies have evolved to mark loss and memorialize the lost; and we will analyze literary, musical, artistic, and architectural expressions of loss, chiefly “great works,” but also some quite humble attempts to record the emotional rupture that loss entails.

We will work on a broad canvas, both spatially and chronologically, looking at testimonies as various as Cicero’s reactions to the death of his adult daughter; interviews with refugees from the war in Syria; and poetry inspired by the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. We will read four books: the memoir of a survivor of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004; a novel about a woman’s gradual loss of her mental capacity to Alzheimer’s Disease; and the accounts of two great twentieth-century authors, C. S. Lewis and Joan Didion, each struggling to survive the loss of their spouse. We will encounter tombstones with simple inscriptions commemorating the death of family pets from the Roman world and set these in the context of scientific research on the human-animal bond. We will study prayers for the dead in the major faith traditions, and visit (virtually) the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, to consider the therapeutic effects of the somber walls of its octagonal interior. We will study photographs by Dorothea Lange documenting poverty and hopelessness during the Depression. We will learn how to listen to a Requiem Mass, whether we encounter it in a sacred building or (more likely) a concert hall.

By the end of the course, which will have ranged far beyond these few examples, we will have gained a deeper understanding of the effects of loss on us both individually and collectively, and of the rituals and therapies that different societies have developed over time to mark and manage it. And we will have learned how fragile is the nature of what we love, and how much we should cherish it while we have the chance.

 

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