HCC's death, dying class offers different perspective on difficult subject
For most people, it's not easy to talk about death.
It's not easy to think about planning a funeral, to consider end of life issues or contemplate what others are really feeling when they're going through the stages of grief.
But a class at Henderson Community College this semester has considered all those things, and students taking the class have been surprised by how doing so has changed their feelings and attitudes about a difficult subject and helped them look to the future with different ideas.
"It's a topic that's taboo," said Rebecca Emerson, the instructor for "Psychosocial Aspects of Death and Dying," a class that hadn't been offered at the local college for several semesters. "A class like this gives people permission to talk about it."
Seven of nine students enrolled in the class -- most working toward some type of human services career ranging from nursing to mortuary science -- all said they faced curious questions from friends, family and fellow students about why they would want to study such a thing, thus underscoring most people's reluctance to talk about such a painful subject.
"The class was not what I expected it to be -- dark and morbid," said student Robert Akers. "It's been pretty uplifting."
"We have been able to discuss death and dying in a positive way," added student Kenny Thomas.
During the semester, students were asked to write an essay planning their own funerals, to complete a survey that solidified their own feelings about end of life care and had an option to sign up for a service learning project to help with either hospice or in a nursing home.
They studied how death and dying have changed in society over the past 150 years and learned how different societies view the process. They learned the stages of bereavement.
They went as a group to see "The Bucket List," a current feature film release in which the two main characters, played by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, are dealing with terminal illness and make a list of the things they want to do before "they kick the bucket."
Class members made their own "bucket lists" and shared them with one another. There were common threads that had to do with family, but the lists varied depending on what stage of their life each person had reached.
Their composite lists included such things as "holding a grandchild," "finding a cure for hopelessness," "learning to speak several foreign languages," "traveling to" lots of different places, "developing an ability to be invisible," "to fall in love," "to spend time with family without fighting," "to go to an NCAA championship," "to see the Northern Lights," "ride in a hot-air balloon," "to re-open some famous homicide cases and solve them" "to experience joy," "to die without regrets" and so on.
Student Lacey King, who confessed that she "has been morbid since she was 5" said making the list was a great exercise for her. "It was like looking death in the face and saying 'I don't care'," she observed. "It made me look deeper into myself."
For others, the exercise put their current lives, schedules and family situations into perspective.
"We have to stop being too busy," said Kay Brown, a nurse who is seeking an advanced degree and who, as a result of the class, has made some hard and fast decisions about her own end of life care. "We're just here for a limited amount of time. You don't know how long that is."
"When I wrote mine, I was bawling," said student Shannon Byrd, who noted that making the list made it easier for her to think that death is actually going to happen.
"It makes you think about the future," said student Dorothy Garrett.
One of the things she put on her list was that she wanted to teach her children how to make one meal all by themselves, to provide peace of mind for her that they would be able to take care of themselves.
Watching the movie and making the list "makes me realize that I need to be doing things with my kids now," she said.
Instructor Emerson agreed.
"It tells us that even though our heart is beating, we're not living," she observed. "It told me that I need to stop grading papers (during family time) and read more bedtime stories."
