now what can you tell us about the national center for death education well the national center for death education began about thirty years ago we began in kenmore square and we were part of the funeral school that was it in kenmore square and when mount decided to take on the funeral service school which at the time was called the new england institute they took as well the national center for death education and that's been our home for the last thirty years so we are always very grateful for taking in the program so who do you serve what is what is your school do well the national center for death education is a standalone program at the college it's part of the continuing education program originally it well now it serves two purposes one is it is definitely a professional educational program in that vein we do quite a few things the first thing we do is throughout the academic year we run online courses on that natal which for those of you who may not know that attala g is the study of end of life death and bereavement the  online programs cover many topics spirituality in children palliative care which is comfort care only we do pieces on trauma suicide so we really want to reach the the practicing clinician hospice worker in the various arenas of them to tell it it's not just about the good death the hospice death where you're surrounded by your families people die in all different ways with all different kinds of situations and as professional health care providers to be able to go to a program and learn about that about sitting with people after a suicide sitting with people after a traumatic loss with such magnificence is september eleventh or in our own commonwealth the boston marathon bombings we also run a summer institute it's always held the third week in july and  for anybody who is not from the area i always say nothing is prettier than boston in the third week and then i get some red sox games in and you can also learn about death of service this year summer institute it runs  monday through friday so this year it'll be july twentieth to the twenty fifth and each speaker gets a day so participants can come for one day or they can come for the entire week we usually have people from as many states is maybe twenty states and also we always get a contingency from puerto rico as well as from canada so when we we are international how long have you been doing some institute also thirty years like that yes last year was the thirtieth year  deaths it's timely and it's important is it particularly yes does it reach everybody no but it should reach most of us will do a piece on that no technology that which is interesting everybody death notifications are being made via this mechanism and especially for those of us who do trauma work in the schools it's important to hear after a loss what students are saying to each other about the loss  i was able to take care of a community on the south shore a couple of years ago it was the sudden death of a student on the south shore and in this person's high school the social workers and guidance counselors took it upon themselves to follow the twitter accounts of the students for the two weeks following the loss of the student to monitor who is high risk what are  kids thinking what are kids doing and when i had the opportunity to speak to the parents i said like it or not it's here to stay you know it's like rock n roll and you need to get on board in order to know what your children are experiencing in their loss and the way it's being demonstrated is through social media so those are just two of the topics that will have this summer but it's fascinating i mean the whole show and just that topic i've got is that is going through my head like do outreach to the community so certainly one of the things that we do is we work in conjunction with the american foundation of suicide prevention and the saturday before thanksgiving is international suicide survivors day  conjunction with and c d is one of the hosting sites and so we have people who have been bereaved as a result of a suicide come to the college on that saturday morning and there's a quilt  that shows the lives of the people in their lives that have died we run a video for them to to hear the camaraderie that is out there you know this this notion of suffering alone is a misnomer and this is one of the days where and cd has this opportunity to say you are going to suffer but you are not alone that there are so many people out there struggling and suffering let us help you with the notion misery does love company and the sense of that hopefulness can can prevail and that and this pain doesn't have to be as constant and as intense as it is initially we just another thing that we just did you know now that i started thinking we had an invitation from franklin county out in the berkshires  collaborate with them and we did it was the day after veteran's day so november twelfth and we went out there and we showed the film on our flight one last mission talk about an emotional morning i thought that it was going to be for clinicians and in the end because it was opened up to the community we had these eighty five to ninety three year old mostly men but some women veterans coming and speaking to us about what it was like to come home from world war two and start again and resume their lives and have children and have married get married and have these jobs and their lives and leave it all behind them until this film was produced which demonstrated to us that our world war two veterans are dying at a clip of nine hundred day so as certainly i worked in hospices were two decades it's important to say thank you yes that's right and honor flight is a film that allows us to to do that to say thank you it gives us some guidance and they highlight  i think it was probably about four or four people out in out in the midwest part of the country and it showed them how they were taken and it's on a flight foundation is a foundation that free of charge will take world war two veterans to washington d c to see the monument that was erected in their honor wow and that the most interesting thing is there is a gentleman i think its name is joe and in the film he talks about he was one of the gentleman on that saw the flag being a wreck did by the three soldiers and he said that's what we did on every island he said i had no idea that it would be as stunning a moment as it ended up being you're hearing it from the person who was there we're not going to get that give too much longer so we try to do outreach to other other hospices because we have the resources and they have the people really so we we make that bridge you know korea and doing something with children we are seasons hospice in newton approached me and asked if we could use the campus for camp kangaroo so camp kangaroo is a children's bereavement camp riginal i think it started in miami florida and we will probably take it you will have about forty five families on campus   i think it's going to be from eight to thirteen or six to thirteen and you know and so i love this piece i am i am also a widow and and so having raised children who are grieving i got my hand in the game by saying that i would like to do the piece on grieving parents raising grieving children which is an interesting dynamic as you know that idea of some days you'll have a good day and the child will be a mess and vice versa and that's part of one of the parts really interests me and i think you're absolutely right and i remember being a young widow and i was that type of person no no no no no i'm ok and i got it i got it got it i'm a control freak i admit it  however what helps is diane you know what will take matt to school and you can take a nap or you know we'll do something to help you out people need to be taught that because if you say no i'm ok people names it's called share the care ok and these two women are from from new york they had a friend these two women did not know each other but they had a mutual friend who was dying of cancer at the time and they wrote this book because it was about how do you get a community together when someone is seriously ill and or dying of their illness and provide the practical care that they need picking up your kids taking people to chemo the dry cleaners right all of that that stuff that we want people to know other people are out there to help you and it can be done and social media is a great place for it because now we have these calendars that we can share with other aware that there's a need for death education isn't something like the professionals learn in school and doctors learn this stuff in school nurses learn this stuff in school no no they don't i think what i went to graduate school i think what we learn and i don't think we learn too much but i mean maybe you know people will say oh i had you know one class on death and dying and that's great but that's not enough when i after i was widowed i ended up looking around for schools and the reason i was doing financial planning and the reason that i decided to go back to school was because of the the very well meaning but and i don't mean this derogatorily ignorant you things that people say you know you're young you can get married you should get married my children were young my son was three and my daughters were only a month old on my go and so i know that people meant well when they said you know you're a nice girl did you try to find a husband first and so i remember thinking there has to be more to this that we need to teach people how to speak to people who are grieving in in a in a in a sensitive manner but in a helpful manner as well so you know we we do nightwatch i think as much as we should i don't think physicians really know how to deliver sad news right i think i think especially in area we live in medical mecca let's not beat each other right we are blessed and we do a great job about you know diagnosing we do a great job about treating but when it comes to that i have to sit down with you and i have to say stacy i am so sorry to tell you this but there are no more curative measures right and that's all that's heavy rain but knowing right it puts you in a different frame of mind back because now you could say well what do i do now well now we're going to send you home we can connect you with a palliative care program or hospice program and you can live until you die yeah right tell us what things you want to do tell us who you need to reach out to we can do that for you rather than keeping you want to curative track and you're thinking i'm tired of going to dialysis every day i'm tired of chemotherapy every day i'm done right and i think professionals need to learn that surrendering to the surrendering to the rest of your life is not giving up it's not a sign of weakness if anything it's a sign of strength to say i'm dying and this is how i'm going to live the rest of my life and you and i both know that in our country particularly we did so what happened was i it after a series of just you know odd events that had happened in my young widowhood i remember going to my my friend rosemary and i said to her you know i don't know if there's a job like this out there i said but somebody needs to speak to people or needs to teach people how to speak to people who are grieving and brooklyn college i'm from brooklyn and so this was an easy out for me early massachusetts had a program talent and then i found men ita and i remember calling up and speaking with my predecessor carol walgren who was the director at the time and i explained my situation and she said to me you know what take one  course and i did i i remember i used to drop carly india drop at nursery school i would drop matt off at first grade and i would go down to newton and i started out with the psychology of greek course a course that i teach now and then i'd go back and slowly i took more and more and more i started volunteering and then i ended up going for my master's in social work with a concentration in end of life i worked in hospice as the bereavement coordinator grief counselor volunteer coordinator you know wearing the many have so lights you know i work and then i was laid off and met my predecessor again at a conference and she said what are you doing i said oh if i go to conferences because from both the professional piece as well so personal piece to look ahead and say what did i need to know as a young grieving person what did i want the professional who sat with me to say to me that would bring me comfort as well as hope and i tell my students all the time you know we do a lot of stuff we have a lot of models and a lot of concepts and a lot of theories thankfully that are good and they work in brief but the most important thing is and i tell them i am required to do two things when i sit with somebody i hold hope and i hold this it this you do the same thing it's just that when we hear it right but that's basically it i hold hope that it's not going to be a set for us it is today now and we will go about that in various ways and i'm going to hold your sadness for you when you think you you are not going to make it through this next week yeah you will yes you will i got through it everybody gets through it and you will too and this is how but it's right it's that knowing the right words is and that's what we need to teach our young professionals so do you do i know you do the online classes are there actual physical classes of people can attend you teach only four we were in a senior program ok and i love it when seniors take the courses because most of the students are young and when you have somebody who is sixty five or sixty or seventy and they address the class with the same commentary the students get a take on it that's different yeah that's no worthy it's not condescending it's done in a a very gentle way but yeah they can take any any of any of the courses that mounted to college i mean the courses that would help them in breed men there's a dynamics of grief which is a basic course there's a clinical skills and grief counseling which i love to yeah and that is a wonderful course because that is the course that gets to the heart of matter of the matter you know that is that's the teaching course i teach social systems and social supports so i'm fact we just finished the course up and for that course the students were asked to they drew losses out of a hat and they were asked to run a grief support group and at the same time i lectured them on the importance of grief support and you know everything that goes with that and then the last course of this is a real fun course is cultural perspectives on death related rituals that sounds fascinating and that is that this year you know in most of the students in the courses i teach a funeral service skits ok they want to be funeral directors and embalmers and and in their courses they study the four main religions and i thought you know we need to redefine culture so that culture is what serves a purpose for us what what traditions do we make great so this year i had them watch films and then related it to the various cultures one of the films that we watched in fact i'm going to collaborate with some hospices on this was the film gen silent it was produced in boston and it's about the l g b t q community and what end of life means for those people who have led a life that oftentimes came with a lot of stigma in health care services right and gen silent does an excellent job and they highlight they have quite a few  s they highlight a woman who's from the area who is mitt operation she is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and she describes a scene where you know here she is with breasts but she hasn't completed her operation and i don't know that she wanted to actually but it's this idea that when she had to go into and i don't know if she was in a rehab or a hospital but it's this how do it's oftentimes the culture of the l g b to tea community that we need to what we need to have people understand that this is a different kind of breed meant that there are couples where they were never allowed to be together or there was some concerns on the part of of one of the partners to go visit the other one and take their hint and kissed their he and caressed their year you a heterosexual environment oh there were people would think twice zach but we could people do think twice we do think twice in another kind of environment and so you know i want people to understand about their cultural difference and we need to train people you know home health aides who oftentimes are not us born in a culture is different right well we are also doing this disservice to the health care provider and i don't is a program that was devised before i came there and it allows the person to have a standing of additional education we ask that the individual complete sixty continuing at credits and they have to be taken it and c d so each of the courses online courses is worth ten continuing at credits so they are four weeks long they're done online you can do them in your pajamas and i'm great yeah because you know people  you know nine to five is difficult when you have a job but you've got responsibilities at home at nine o'clock at night may be your time to get on a computer and say now i can concentrate do reading some discussion questions so they can earn ten continuing end credits through that and then each day at the summer institute is worth six continuing it credits at the end of the sixty continuing ed credits after the completion of the courses we ask  scholarly project is produced for us and that can be anything of interest to them and the reason is because i don't want to assign something to an adult learner if it's not of interest to them so if you're working in ger you well i'd like you to do something on children you're going to think you know that's not my step great and so what i said you stacey what your interest so people are doing all different kinds of things i have a gentleman in pennsylvania who is doing a survey of home health aides and actually it's going to be a cultural piece that he's doing and on the understanding of the culture that they that they thought of america when they came here working in the nursing facilities what they think now what they've learned and how it sits with them why is it traumatizing so he's doing a piece on that i had a woman call me up yesterday originally she was going to do one on buddhist traditions and now she's settings you know so very different right the environment is different sterile and very different from the hospice this fascination of another half hour to go through the village and hear more about everything but thank you so much for coming to you are most welcome and all your information should be on line and his name is has any questions or wants to get in touch with you they can just google the national center for death education and it will pop right up monitor thank you so much so well invented for having me all right and thank you