Volunteering in hospice helps Macalester students contemplate death's mysteries up close

Volunteering in hospice helps Macalester students contemplate death's mysteries up close 
MSN - Minneapolis Star Tribune; by Katy Read; 5/10/24 
"You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen," author Paul Auster wrote about humans' difficulty confronting our own mortality. ... Auster himself died last month at age 77. ... How can humans fully grasp the inevitability of our own death? It's a tough question to answer, maybe close to impossible. Three Macalester College students who just finished a course called the Anthropology of Death and Dying don't have the answer. Their professor, who has spent much of his career studying death as an anthropologist and a former hospice nurse, doesn't have an answer. A hospice nurse doesn't have the answer. And a hospice patient with lung cancer doesn't have the answer, even knowing he soon will confront its reality firsthand.