Death and Dying

While teaching classes for the University of Minnesota’s Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing, Dr. Tenzin Namdul noticed that students were especially engaged during sessions about death and dying. They had many questions about death, and were keenly interested in Tibetan Medicine and culture, striving to apply their newfound knowledge to their work in nursing, medicine, social work, and more.

An assistant professor and director of the Bakken Center’s Tibetan Healing Initiative (THI), Namdul found himself wanting to dive more deeply with students on timeless questions surrounding death: What is death? And what happens to people when they die?

He developed Death, Happiness, & Resilience: Rethinking Care and Wellbeing at the Time of Dying and started teaching the two-credit course this spring.

The course covers a wide range of topics related to death and dying using a social, spiritual, and biological lens to explore historical and cross-cultural philosophies. Through readings and discussions, Namdul fosters understanding of theoretical views of death, death in different societies, and contemporary topics like hospice care and euthanasia. The class culminates with an investigation of rebirth and the afterlife, plus consideration of what makes a “good death.”

Namdul, a medical anthropologist and doctor of Tibetan Medicine, has long been fascinated by the concept of mortality and how people’s views of death shape the way they think and behave individually and collectively. It extends into cultural values, how people care for others who are dying, and how they approach their own aging and mortality. He believes that the Death, Happiness, & Resilience course will help people explore an often stressful or avoided subject while cultivating compassion and fortitude.

“There is so much craving to learn more about death and dying,” Namdul says. “Healthcare providers, faculty, community members who have family members going through the later stages of life — or they are in the later stages of life — have so much interest in this topic. All of the students who joined us this semester are from different professions and cultural backgrounds, which is very interesting and exciting for us.”

Namdul’s course is a good fit for the Bakken Center, with its broad mandate to focus on human health and wellbeing, says Center Director Mary Jo Kreitzer, PhD, RN, FAAN.

Death and dying is an experience that everyone will encounter, personally and with loved ones, making it an important topic to explore in a safe, sensitive, and supportive environment.

“For many, the topic of death is taboo. Many people find it difficult to talk about, and conversations about death often bring up feelings of anxiety, fear, and sadness,” Dr. Kreitzer says. “I hope the course demystifies death and helps students see that there are ways to both live well and die well.”

A key component of the class is its exploration of Tibetan Buddhist culture and its approach to death and dying. “In Western cultures, death is often feared, mysterious, and private, whereas Eastern cultures like Tibetan Buddhism embrace death because it’s viewed as the ultimate truth that everyone experiences,” Namdul says.

The class is rooted in the Bakken Center’s long commitment to its Tibetan Healing Initiative. “The goal of THI is to develop a comprehensive and integrated understanding of human health and wellbeing by exploring the insights of Tibetan Medicine, contemplative knowledge, and western science,” Kreitzer says. “The course is aligned with this goal as students examine death through a cross-cultural lens that has implications for their own understanding of death as well as care for the dying. Ultimately, a person’s attitude toward oneself, others, and death can shape and inform human happiness and resilience.”

The course is unique because of the Center’s interdisciplinary approach, teaching about death at the intersection of biomedicine, anthropology, social science, contemplative science, and Tibetan Medicine. Its overarching goal, Namdul says, is to help students be more informed about death and dying in order to advocate for themselves and others who might be facing a terminal disease, long-term conditions like Alzheimer’s, or general aging.

“How can we rethink or reevaluate the way we care for dying people?” Namdul says. “We think our students can make a huge impact when they go back to their own professional work, where they can advocate for themselves or others with different policies or practices.”

“The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how unprepared people were to contend with significant amounts of death, and how fearful they are of the unknown,” Namdul says. He hopes that students will be more prepared to have conversations with family members, patients, or co-workers about death and dying and help people ease their fears.

Ultimately, he envisions students becoming more resilient in the face of their own mortality.

For Dr. MicKenzie “Micki” Fasteland, instructional designer in the Bakken Center’s Learning Resources Group, teaming with Namdul to develop the course came at the right time in her own life. Her grandmother had recently passed away, and she found solace in reading the course materials and engaging with the other media. “I was seeing many ways that people dealing with their own death and people moving into working with people who are dying could benefit from the class,” says Fasteland.

“As I was going through the resources, I was thinking how useful it would be to have these different frameworks for approaching death and dying, not as something to be scared of but as a natural part of life.”

Fasteland found the cross-cultural components of the course especially fascinating, including the exploration of how different cultures prepare for death and define being dead. She also thinks that people will appreciate the approach to rethink death in ways that aren’t steeped in fear and negativity and learn skills to help others do the same.

“Students explore the concept of a good death and question what that means in different cultural contexts and for themselves individually,” Fasteland adds.