The following is a summary of a story that originally appeared on the Service-Learning website .
Deborah T. Gold's 23-year-old service-learning course, Death & Dying, offered students an experience few academic settings attempt - learning to face mortality by forming relationships with people nearing the end of life.
This past fall, the professor emeritus in psychiatry and behavioral sciences and senior fellow emeritus in the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development taught the course for the last time. She leaves behind a legacy of more than two decades of teaching students to sit with discomfort and grief.
Gold's comfort with discussing death began early, shaped by a family that treated end‑of‑life wishes as everyday conversation. Those early discussions, along with personal losses, convinced her that death should be acknowledged, not avoided.
"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."
When she proposed the course in 2001, some colleagues worried the topic was too heavy for young adults, but students saw things differently. They partnered with residents in Durham hospice programs, nursing homes, and care facilities, sometimes offering conversation, sometimes just their presence, and sometimes even companionship during a person's final moments.
Gold also recruited former students who had taken the course to return and help facilitate peer discussions and prepare students for emotionally complex experiences.
Saying goodbye became one of the course's most difficult lessons. Some students returned to find a partner's room emptied after a death; others struggled to talk about the difficulty that came with leaving someone they had grown to care.
Gold emphasized that these relationships were reciprocal, providing students with humility and emotional literacy while offering residents dignity and companionship.
As she stepped away from teaching, Gold sees her legacy carried forward by former students now working in medicine, social work, and research.
