Teaching Death, Teaching Life

For more than two decades, Professor Deborah T. Gold’s service-learning course Death & Dying taught students something most Americans spend their lives avoiding: how to be present with people who are dying. In Fall 2025, she taught the course for the final time.

According to family lore, Gold’s first words were not “mama” or “dada,” but “pull the plug”—a phrase absorbed from dinner table conversations where her parents spoke plainly about their end-of-life wishes with the same casualness most families reserve for vacation plans.

It’s an origin story that feels inevitable for someone who would spend more than two decades teaching students to do what many people avoid: sit with the dying, form real relationships, and stay present when those people are gone.

Her parents’ openness was only the beginning. Later came a best friend’s childhood departure that felt like a death, the moment she viewed her grandmother’s body at the funeral home, and years of taking her nieces and nephews to visit family graves.

“The key,” Gold says, “is exposure. If we believe death is a normal part of life, we need to deal with it from the beginning.”

By the time she designed Death & Dying in 2001, Gold had already seen how little room most families—and institutions—made for conversations about mortality. Students regularly arrived carrying fresh grief: grandparents, parents, siblings lost within the past year. Many were headed for careers in medicine and frightened of the one thing no textbook could shield them from.

When Gold first proposed the course, some colleagues pushed back with responses such as “They don’t need to know about it this young" or ”We don’t want to spoil their idyllic existence,” she recalls.

But students told a different story. Repeatedly, they confided that death was something no one in their lives would talk about. They wanted language, context, and guidance.

These conversations exposed a gap in the curriculum. “We had been teaching about human development and aging,” Gold says, “but we never discussed what comes after.”

Learning Through Immersion

Gold designed Death & Dying with service-learning at its core—not optional, but essential, and carried out in close collaboration with community partners.

“The only possible way to learn is to immerse yourself,” she says. “It’s like kids learning how to swim. You’ve got to jump in the pool.”

Over the course’s 23-year history, it partnered with roughly 20 community sites in Durham, including Duke Hospice, the VA, nursing homes, and continuing care facilities. Students visited the same residents weekly—sometimes singing hymns, sometimes talking, sometimes simply offering quiet presence. Some held hands with people who were actively dying.

One student stayed with a man who had no family. “He was singing Amazing Grace to the patient when he died,” Gold recalls.

One of Gold’s most intentional choices was recruiting trained LEAPS (Learning through experience, action, partnership, and service) undergraduate facilitators—students who had taken the course and returned to help prepare new students and lead small-group reflections. “I think you can reflect more honestly when the person grading you isn’t in the room,” she says. Many LEAPS facilitators volunteered for multiple semesters, drawn back to the discussion by how deeply the course had shaped them. 

They led four core sessions: preparing students for their first visits, facilitating the aging simulation, guiding reflection, and helping students learn how to say goodbye.

The aging simulation was deliberately uncomfortable. Students navigated campus with bubble wrap over their eyes, heavy-duty ear plugs to simulate deafness, hands taped to limit dexterity, uncooked beans in one shoe to create pain, or a knee bound so it wouldn’t bend—while facilitators mimicked the impatience older adults often encounter: Come on, you’re walking too slowly.

The exercise prompted difficult recognition. Students saw their own impatience with grandparents and the ease with which they dismissed older adults’ struggles.

“They’re at an age where they think, I am immortal; I will remain this way forever,” Gold says. “It’s hard to say, ‘No, you won’t,’ and even harder to get them to believe it.”

Learning to Say Goodbye

When Gold told students they would form relationships deep enough that saying goodbye at the end of the semester would hurt, students were skeptical. “They never believe me,” she says.

But every semester, one or two students walked into a familiar room at a facility only to find the room empty and cleaned out. Their friend had died. Loss was no longer abstract.

For everyone else, saying goodbye was non-negotiable—even when dementia made communication unpredictable. Students protested: But they won’t remember. Gold responded gently, drawing on examples from past semesters to help students understand why goodbyes matter. Over time, she’d seen how the absence of closure can linger, and how relationships formed through consistent presence don’t simply disappear when a semester ends. In other cases, students struggled to name what they felt when it was time to leave long-term partners they had come to care deeply about, especially after years of shared visits. 

Moments like these revealed the heart of Gold’s teaching: these relationships were not charity but reciprocity—mutual, meaningful, and deeply human. Students received humility, perspective, and emotional literacy; residents received presence, dignity, and continuity. Without that shared acknowledgment, both people are left holding something meant to be carried together.

What Students Carry Forward

When asked what she is most proud of, Gold doesn’t mention awards. She names her former students—now physicians, social workers, nurses, and researchers—carrying the work forward.

What does she hope they carry with them?

That older people and dying people aren’t gone yet; they deserve presence, patience, and to be engaged as whole people.
That it’s okay to feel sadness, uncertainty, and hope.

These lessons are rarely named in higher education, particularly in STEM environments where students are trained to analyze and solve. In Gold’s classroom, emotion wasn’t a distraction from learning; it was part of the learning—how to be present with death, and how to live with greater honesty, attentiveness, and heart.

There is something fitting—and bittersweet—about the course ending with Gold herself leaning into the lesson she taught for more than two decades: how to say goodbye with honesty and heart.

“The fact that they can take it from here and give it to other people is really important,” she says. “That’s where the real legacy is.”