Should we teach our students about dealing with death?

I heard on NPR this morning that New Jersey may become the sixth state in the nation to permit physician-assisted suicide.  Coincidentally, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an essay yesterday on whether we should be teaching our students how to confront this inevitability.

Assisted suicide once seemed like sci fi stuff.  The old Charlton Heston film, Soylent Green, comes to my mind.  Here's the scene in which Sol (Edward G. Robinson, himself not long for this life) chooses this way out.

Meanwhile, there are those who are attempting to cheat death.  For instance, there's the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

"The Alcor Life Extension Foundation is the world leader in cryonics, cryonics research, and cryonics technology. Cryonics is the science of using ultra-cold temperature to preserve human life with the intent of restoring good health when technology becomes available to do so. Alcor is a non-profit organization located in Scottsdale, Arizona, founded in 1972."

Then there's the young Russian billionaire seeking immortality by melding his mind with a computer. 

"Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov has ambitious plans that involve the blending of human consciousness into a computer. Concerned that he will be dead by the 2050s, Dmitry wishes to live on forever by uploading his brain into a computer and achieving the state of 'cybernetic immortality'. 

After achieving fame in the field of internet media, Dmitri founded the 2045 initiative where he has a team of scientists working relentlessly to develop cybernetic immortality over the next few decades."

These ideas may one day work.  Consider what that might mean.

So you are frozen, later to be awakened and restored to life.  Will your loved ones be old?  Will they even be alive?  

Or suppose you are Dmitry the Billionaire, now resident in a computer or a robot or some such silicone brain.  I think you would have to be a very cold fish indeed to relish that existence over oblivion.

So much of what we do --- whether we are hedonists or workaholics --- is aimed at putting death to one side.  Both obsessions are in the final analysis distractions.  Someone once asked Woody Allen --- my favorite philosopher --- if he hoped to achieve immortality through his films.  He reportedly replied he hoped to cheat death by not dying.  Shakespeare might retort, "We owe God a death.  He who pays this year is quit for the next."

In this age of assisted suicide and the potential for some sort of "immortality," so many ethical and practical issues confront us.   One practical question is, will your life insurance carrier pay up, if you choose assisted suicide?  Will it make a difference that you are doomed and only seeking not to prolong the agony, as opposed to choosing the option because you are just plain tired of life?

On the ethical side, is it just that some few will be able to cheat God of what Shakespeare says God is owed?  If there is an intelligence behind the universe, does that Being give two hoots about what any of us does?  

There's a pretty good college course in there somewhere.  But I'm not sure we could fill the class.