Students take a moment to mediate in the chapel at the end of class.

“I really liked that we had to face the idea of mortality. Usually it’s really easy to not think about it.”
—Nita Chai ’16

The last class session was held at the professor’s house, where each of the nine students lit candles for every person they had worked with who had died.

Sound morbid? Not at all, say the members of Professor Ron Barrett’s Anthropology of Death and Dying course. Indeed, what surprised him most, says Kenji Shoemaker ’16 (Madison, Wis.), was “how not dark the course was. In all honesty, death is a really interesting topic to discuss in a class setting.”

Class members lit the remembrance candles for the dying people they had worked with over the semester as hospice volunteers—an important aspect of the Monday night course. “I really valued that experience,” says Nita Chai ’16 (Apple Valley, Minn.), “although I didn’t realize how sad I’d be when my first patient died.”

The four-hour weekly hospice work, together with readings and discussions, caused the class members to tackle the subject of death far more directly than do most of their youthful peers. “I really liked that we had to face the idea of mortality,” says Chai. “Usually it’s really easy to not think about it.”

Professor Barrett worked as a hospice nurse during graduate school, so he knows how enriching that experience can be. But he also realizes it can be emotionally challenging, so he devotes the final hour of each class to meditation and reflection in the campus chapel. As the semester progresses, he says, that processing hour begins to blend into the seminar portion of the class—a sign the course is successful, he believes. The hospice internship, he says, “gives the students a clinical experience they would never have in any other program.”

Anthropology of Death and Dying also covers such topics as coma, advanced directives, palliative care, and funerals. A video of two autopsies—graphic enough that Barrett warned students about it beforehand and excused the squeamish from watching—took up part of one class. In another class period, Barrett talked about controversial past incidents of persistent vegetative state, such as the Karen Ann Quinlan and Terry Schiavo cases.

Although a number of the students, like Chai, are pre-med, many others who enroll are not; his class members tend to be majoring in a wide range of fields, says Barrett. For any student, he adds, the class will call upon them to “examine the quality of their lives at an early stage, giving them a strong appreciation for life and the people in their lives.”

January 8 2015

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