“You’ve Lost A Way Of Life”

Covid-19 adds immediacy to SCSU prof’s bereavement class.

Grief, he said, might explain the roller coaster of emotions many are currently feeling. Everyone deals with it differently, he said, but acknowledging the feeling and adjusting one’s mindset can be immensely helpful.

“We’re stuck in the house, we’re cut off from people, but we’re still waking up, we’re still here,” he said. ​“It’s hard, but we can try to turn this into some kind of positive.”

LaDore is well-acquainted with loss. His father died of cancer when he was 10 years old and his mother died of a blood clot just three years later. He remembers telling people about the untimely death of his parents growing up, and having them respond with silence, unaware what to say in the face of such tragedy. He learned early on that when talking about death is inevitable, the best thing to do is simply say something. In most cases, people like to talk about those they’ve lost.

“My advice is, don’t avoid the topic. Get rid of the elephant in the room. It’s not always sad,” LaDore said. ​“It’s so powerful.”

LaDore has more than accepted his relationship with death. He has embraced it, openly sharing his own experience — and getting others to do the same — in his job teaching SCSU’s Death, Dying & Bereavement class, which is held on Tuesday evenings and will meet online for the rest of the semester while the college is closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

LaDore is considering having his students do a final project on Covid-19 this year and is assuring students they can find support in him or the class itself if they need it during this time. It’s an outlet that students have used over the years when they’ve lost someone.

The class is described on the university’s website as ​“understanding death in our culture and social and personal mechanisms for responding to death, dying and bereavement.” It’s been offered at SCSU since 1975. LaDore said the class grew out of the 1969 release of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, which outlined the now-classic ​“five stages of grief.” LaDore said that similar classes exist at other universities. Talking about death in an organized but casual way occurs beyond university classrooms too. Nathalie Bonafe, a certified end-of-life-doula, runs a monthly Death Cafe from Koffee! on Audubon Street. She and fellow doulas help clients and their families ease the transition as death approaches, offering non-medical services, from downsizing a home and writing a will to facilitating grief management after a loved one has passed away. Bonafe supports talking about death, loss and grief often and openly, and well before an individual is facing the prospect head-on. The Death Cafes, which will be held online for the time being, are meant to encourage frank discussion surrounding these topics, making them less taboo. Bonafe describes the meetings as ​“a safe, respectful place where you can share beliefs, curiosity, fear and stories.” The New Haven cafes are modeled on similar events that happen all over the world.

LaDore — who is friendly and open, as quick to share a laugh as he is an emotional personal story — did his undergraduate and graduate work at SCSU and took the class himself in 1994 when he was getting his MS in counseling. In 2002, while employed there (he’s worked at the university for 28 years in a variety of departments), he guest-co-taught the class with his brother, sharing their family experience. And in 2012, when the class’s longstanding professor got sick and died (another tough loss for LaDore), the school asked him to take over. He’s filled that role ever since, as well as currently serves as SCSU’s director of transfer student services.

While the class can be described broadly as ​“understanding death in our culture,” its curriculum, along with the students’ experiences, is much weightier — some might say more spiritual — than a few sentences in the course catalogue. 

“You’re all here for a reason. You just don’t know what it is yet,” he likes to tell his students, as well as the fact that ​“you are all going to lose somebody, and you’re all going to get through it.”

Some students have already suffered major losses. Others are simply curious about the class, which is offered by the University’s Public Health Department. Some, including a fair share of nursing and counseling students, use it as a credit toward their majors, although it’s not required for any particular field. A handful, LaDore admitted, thinks it will yield an ​“easy A.”

Whatever the reason, it has grown incredibly popular over the years through word-of-mouth accolades shared among students and fills up each semester.

A Nurturing Space

Like Bonafe, LaDore aims to create a safe and nurturing space in his classroom. He creates his own lesson plans and invites a series of regular guest lecturers to speak. Over the years he’s welcomed representatives from funeral homes, as well as from local organizations, such as Hope After Loss, a nonprofit serving the pregnancy and infant loss community. A retired police officer who killed someone in the line of duty has visited to tell his story, as has the family of Jericho Scott, a New Haven teenager who was murdered in 2015. And LaDore’s brother visits to play the guitar music that’s helped him grieve over the years.

There’s always one class dedicated to the topic of suicide. And LaDore has asked class members to compose a letter to someone they love, explaining how much that person means to them. Students are asked to keep a journal about their experience throughout the semester.

Christa Doran lost her 6‑year-old daughter, Lea, to DIPG, a fatal and incurable brain tumor, in 2017. She’s visited the class multiple times since.

“I always say yes to speaking at Frank’s class because it does a few things. It helps me share what I’ve learned about the grieving process, which I believe we have all wrong in this country. It helps me honor Lea and do something brave. She showed me the way,” Doran said. ​“It allows me to show up and share the story about not being okay, about sitting in the mud, and about how life doesn’t have to be happy and beautiful. The most beautiful lives, I have learned, have been freckled with failure and usually come with deep pain, grief, and loss.”

In a social media post following her most recent visit to the class in November, she wrote that her message is about ​“how we need to normalize the process that is grief (it has no end) and pain and get better about holding space and seeing people in pain. No fixing. No comparing. No one upping.” Doran has shared her experience on her blog, Lessons from Lea, as well.

“Bearing witness,” is what much of LaDore’s class is about. The first session is usually pretty quiet, LaDore said, but students open up as the weeks continue. He begins each semester by congratulating the students on signing up.

“I tell them, it’s going to be emotional, it’s going to be fun, it’s going to be a lot of different things,” he said. He follows up by explaining that if it gets ​“too heavy,” they’re welcome to skip a session or take a break. 

During a class held in early March, LaDore conducted an exercise called A Lesson in Dying that hospice workers sometimes use while they are in training. Students were each given a stack of small pieces of paper and asked to write down the names of four people they loved, four places (or parts of nature) they loved, four activities they loved and four things they loved.

LaDore stood at the front of the classroom and read a narrative from the point of view of an individual going through the stages of a serious illness and, eventually, death. As he read, he paused at the end of certain paragraphs to ask the students to pick two cards — things they loved — and throw them on the floor.

Near the end of the exercise LaDore walked silently from desk to desk, took two pieces of paper at random from the students and threw them to the floor himself. ​“Hey, you just took my family!” one of them said.

“I can’t do it,” another said quietly, when everyone was down to their last few cards and it was time to discard two more. 

The class discussed the point of the activity when it was finished: as we get sick and death approaches, we lose more and more of what we cherish. Many noted that their final pieces of paper bore their loved ones’ names.

​“Think about the things you held onto the longest,” LaDore said.

Sophomore Lexi MacDonald, who is studying public health, said after the session that evening that being in the class has ​“definitely had an impact.”

“I’ve lost people who were important to me and it definitely does give you a bit of perspective,” she said. ​“You only live once.”

Alexis Greer, a junior studying psychology, said that she had a unique perspective on the subject, having had a near-death experience in the form of a burst aneurysm a few years before. The experience, rather than scaring her, has made her ​“super cool with the idea of death,” she said.

And Alandis Whitley, a sophomore, said she’s studying to be a child life specialist who will work with patients in the pediatric department of a hospital. She wanted to take a class on death because she will have to have difficult talks with the families she meets. 

Their reasoning echoed LaDore’s firm belief that everyone is ​“there for a reason.” It’s a concept LaDore takes seriously in his own life.

He not only lost both parents early in life, but has also lost more than his fair share of other family and friends, and has gained valuable insight teaching the SCSU class. Because of his unique experience, he’s often the first person that loved ones or acquaintances contact when they have lost or are losing someone, or when they are facing a grim medical diagnosis.

He doesn’t mind. He knows you can’t tell someone else how to grieve. But you can listen.

“Mostly,” he said, ​“it’s about gaining perspective.”

At the end of the hospice worker exercise, LaDore had the students take one last step after their pieces of paper had all been crumpled and thrown to the floor. It wasn’t part of the original exercise for hospice workers, but he added it for extra impact.

He pointed to the first student on the left side of the classroom. ​“Say your name, and follow it with the words, ​‘and I’m alive.” He asked all of them to do the same. 

The words cascaded through the classroom, each student smiling, stating their name and a reminder that resonated powerfully that evening, after discussing all they had to lose.

“I’m alive,” they said, one after the other. ​“I’m alive.”