The first full-length 9-11 movie is now being distributed. It’s called “The Guys,” and it tells the story of a New York journalist who helps a fire captain write eulogies.

Two Kansas University assistant professors, Adrianne Kunkel and Michael Dennis, could have advised the scriptwriters.

They are faculty members in the communications studies department, and they’ve dissected about 20 eulogies, many taken from the Internet, looking for their common ideas and themes.

They discuss the tactics used by eulogizers in the January issue of the journal Death Studies.

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky would have understood immediately what Kunkel and Dennis believe is the most effective way of helping those in pain to find meaning in suffering.

Dostoevsky spent years in a Russian prison and then more in enforced military service, writing afterward that suffering is “the sole origin of consciousness.”

He added, “It is also inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”

To draw back from pain, as Dostoevsky did, and to view it from a wider perspective is “the most effective form of coping,” write Kunkel and Dennis.

Several tactics fall under the general strategy of providing mourners with a wider perspective.

Sometimes the eulogizers talk about an afterlife. Sometimes they recollect experiences with the deceased as a way of shifting from the current loss to thanks for what was shared.

And sometimes eulogizers recite lessons and traits learned from the deceased.

In addition to helping mourners shift perspective, eulogizers also commonly confess their own feelings about the death and suggest actions that those in the audience can perform that will echo the dead person’s goals and values.

The researchers scrutinized five of the 20 eulogies with special care.

Three were for famous figures. Two were highly personal.

One of those was a eulogy delivered by Kunkel’s father for her grandmother. The other was delivered by Dennis on the occasion of his father’s accidental death.

Kunkel said that the Dennis eulogy revealed an unseen side of his father and put his misfortune in a positive light.

Bob Dennis had been a college soccer star and a veterinarian. Called “Broadway Bob” by everyone, he was a big kidder, a counselor and, for some people, a father.

But he sometimes confessed, too. He told his son, for example, what few others knew — that he felt he had bad luck.

And that would be hard to deny given the way Bob Dennis died.

He stopped his car to help someone who’d been hurt in an accident — and was hit by a drunk driver.

Kunkel recalls how hard it was for Dennis to write the eulogy for the funeral.

“In a way,” she says, “the research for this paper began because we were trying to take something good from the bad that had happened.”

One of the mind’s most spectacular powers is its ability to turn woe into wisdom.

Sometimes the result is a novel like Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov.”

Sometimes it’s an academic article on the eulogy.

Sometimes it’s a few sentences shared from one’s own experience with a person whose heart is breaking.

— Roger Martin is a research writer and editor for the Kansas University Center for Research and editor of Explore, KU’s research magazine Web site, which can be found at www.research.ku.edu. Martin’s e-mail address is rmartin@kucr.ku.edu.