Living and Dying: Explorations with Young Adults

Six students (five seniors, one junior) spanning majors from across the college tackled this difficult topic of death in order to provide meaningful recommendations to Honoring Choices MN. One of the first activities for “Living and Dying” involved students’ participation in a Death Over Dinner themselves, facilitated by Mary. The students recorded short responses before and after the dinner. Before, student’s reactions ranged from “cautiously optimistic,” “nervous,” “anxious,” and “afraid” to “excited.” After, they expressed feeling “relieved,” “curious,” “informed,” “excited,” “calm,” and “motivated.”

Death Over Dinner with St. Olaf Students

In order to gather data for the research questions, the students then decided to explore a multi-pronged approach. In pairs, they each facilitated their own Death Over Dinner with St. Olaf students. They tabled out in front of the Cage to elicit responses from their peers, as well as written dialogue via sticky notes in two hallways on campus. In addition, they elicited responses in another interdisciplinary ACE course, “Frontiers of Aging,” co-taught by Ashley Hodgsen (Economics) and Jessica Petok (Psychology).

results

Students were able to generate a few key recommendations for Honoring Choices about how to invite young adults into the conversation about death, dying, and advance care planning, such as highlighting “We Croak,” an app that sends reminders to your phone five times a day that you’re going to die; utilizing social media networks to share resources and conversations among organizations and individual young adults; and providing ideas for young adults to start the conversation with family and friends.

reflections

Shannon Holder ‘19 shared that “this ACE/ID course allowed me to apply my foundation in analytical skills from my chemistry major and other research experiences to community challenges.” She added that it was “very rewarding to see how our liberal arts backgrounds contribute to these interdisciplinary challenges with respect to advance care planning.”

Not only did the students discover that their peers are in large part willing to have and/or are already having these conversations, but they themselves, after exploring this topic in a supportive classroom community, felt empowered to have conversations with their own friends and family. Adding to this empowerment was the knowledge that their work was helping to elevate the topics of end-of-life care and advance care planning among students, Northfield, and the entire state.

Honoring Choices MN is the statewide organization devoted to spreading awareness and education around advance care planning and end-of-life decisions. Their goal is to spur family conversations about future health care preferences and to assist health care organizations and community partners with the installation of a comprehensive advance care planning program. Honoring Choices had previously worked with Mary in her 2018 DUR to create and test an evaluation tool for community interventions such as Death Over Dinners.

Reflections

Lynn Betzold from Honoring Choices MN attended the final presentation at St. Olaf and had this to say about the experience:

Their presentation offered a thoughtful response to the questions first posed by Honoring Choices Minnesota (HCM) at the start of the semester. Successfully achieving this goal provided valuable insight that HCM will carry forward into the ongoing national Advance Care Planning conversation. Equally significant was the student’s willingness to engage authentically in the class experience as evidenced through their sharing of personal “takeaways”. While it is admittedly too early to identify two class experiences as a pattern or trend, it demonstrates the success of this platform as a means to engage college-aged individuals in meaningful conversations about Living and Dying and thus moves us a step closer to our goal of ensuring every person’s health care choices are clearly defined and honored.