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heal.”
    Mary turned quiet, looking embarrassed.
    In that moment, Norma realized that Mary did not want the wound to heal. She had no family left, no friends, and no other visitors to speak of. She must have looked forward to the dressings. It was the only time she had face-to-face conversation in days.
    Norma called up the local church to tell them about the 110-year-old woman in a trailer, suggesting that maybe they could bring her a pie once in a while. She also continued to visit Mary regularly, even if not summoned.
    Still today, on a wall in her office, she kept a black-and-white framed photo of her younger self, kneeling next to Mary. From her patient, Norma had learned that the deepest wounds can never be healed with ointment and gauze. It was a lesson more valuable than anything found in a textbook or dissertation.
    She always held on to that tenderness she had for the elderly like Mary, those forgotten and overlooked. It was the same kind she felt for forlorn strangers, her students, and her own children. They needed her. And she didn’t mind being needed.
    So when it came to defining her Death in Perspective class, the professor developed the habit of handing out a poem by Khalil Gibran called “On Death” at the end of every semester. Part of it went like this:
    Then Almitra spoke, saying, “We would ask now of Death.”
    And he said: You would know the secret of death.
    But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

T AKE -H OME W RITING A SSIGNMENT : The Fire Story
    Write about the time you walked through fire—your life’s hardest moment—and how you came out of that experience alive. Who was there for you? How did you get through it? How did it change you?

TWO
Life Stories of Norma Lynn
    Her home was a haven of fresh-baked cookies, porcelain dolls, and Christmas carols—nothing close to the images of high cerebral pretense or mystical musings that a professor of death might conjure up. Musical compositions of Richard Wagner did not fill her living space, and neither did the essays of Michel de Montaigne. There were no black votive candles, no altars swirling with Nag Champa incense, no household decor inspired by a Día de los Muertos celebration.
    Norma lived with her family in a seafoam-colored two-story colonial house with an eggplant purple door on a quiet block across from a school in a Highland Park neighborhood, within walking distance of an earth-friendly mattress shop, a bubble tea café, three synagogues, and a vitamin, herbs, and organic foods store. The area’s newspaper racks offered The Star-Ledger and the Highland Park Mirror, which featured articles on the local arts festival and an upcoming Zumba Latin dance aerobics demonstration. The professor and her partner of more than two decades, Norman, a child psychologist and also the father of their teenage daughter, had lived in that house for fifteen years. Norma and Norman. Norma’s older daughter from her first and only marriage (she didn’t feel the need to walk down the aisle a second time) was a college student studying law at Rutgers University and had lived there too before she went off to school.
    One morning, Norma decided to explain the meaning behind various objects in her home, such as the quilt on the sofa—it was made of swaths of childhood dresses, bedroom curtains, and favorite shirts that hadbelonged to her older daughter, Melissa. “I said to her whenever she was sad or upset, she could wrap her childhood around her in the quilt.” The professor continued the tour, pointing out a menorah that had belonged to her grandmother and a statue of a black Jesus given to her by Norman at Christmas.
    Norman had been raised Jewish. Norma’s mother and grandmother were also Jewish, and her father was Catholic. She’d grown up going to both synagogue and Catholic Mass and attending a private Catholic school, where the nuns terrified her—tying students’ left hands behind their backs to force them to