Halloween’s this Friday night, and students in one class at Hawkeye Community college are out in the graveyard doing field work for their latest assignment. The course on Death and Dying is taught by Pat Ashwood, chairman of the school’s Social Science and Education department. He began after a daughter died of a brain tumor, and he learned others were interested in studying grief, dying, and the funeral process. He started with an interest in consumerism, since his daughter’s funeral proved expensive, and he went from there to examining funeral rituals and teaching his students how people in different parts of the world look at death. And Ashwood says he found it a chore to get students to face the idea of their own death.Few have a will, and many of their parents don’t have a will, or an “advanced directive” to tell others what they’d want done if they are on life-support — something Ashwood says he gets them to think about. Ashwood says students have been doing research on old cemeteries in the area, linking the headstones with local history. He has students doing their cemetery project, which is due the day before Halloween, gathering information from headstones that he adds to a big database, slowly gathering information on cemeteries around the region. Yesterday (Tuesday) the class had a field trip to a local funeral home, a routine part of the curriculum for this course. Ashwood says cremation’s more common at funeral homes, and some ideas “freak out” students like having someone’s ashes made into a piece of jewelry. Ashwood says it was tough finding a textbook to use. He says some nursing students take the course on death and dying, and some who plan to go into police work and are curious about causes of death. The website has links to everything from organ-donor resources to Iowa’s casket-building Trappist monks. (news editors: site is http://www.hawkeye.cc.ia.us/faculty/pashwood/CONSUMER.htm )