Care and the Good Life: Exploring Care, End-of-Life, and Death

What does it mean to live a flourishing life? This is one of the most fundamental questions of human existence and this course explores this question through an engagement with the universal human experiences of caregiving and dying. Together, we will dig deep into the centrality of caregiving to the human experience and identify and explore normative claims around care, aging and disability, and death.  Specifically, we will explore issues of death denial, dependence and interdependence as we think together about the role of care in our lives across the lifespan, but especially leading up to the final stages of life.

In dominant U.S. culture, notions of individualism prevail and caregiving is often conceptualized as a burden. But, who has decided that the care of other humans is a burden or that an unburdened life is one most worth living? Who is to say that we’d prefer or be better off to be ‘unburdened’ from significant relationships in our lives?  Collectively, we will consider more life-affirming, meaningful and pluralistic ideas about care and consider who is most served by current mainstream normative claims. Finally, we will look at the ways these ideas are being resisted. Guest speakers will help us explore how individuals have engaged with questions about how one lives life well by discussing how they have replied to these questions with their lives for meaningful engagement.

Readings in this interdisciplinary course will include Lyn Lofland, Viktor Frankl, Carol Gilligan, Martha Nussbaum, and The Sage Handbook of Death and Dying to focus on various cultural approaches, such as the Native American, Hindu, Muslim, Japanese, Taoist, and Jewish ways of death.