I have been a professor in the Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) Department at Chadron State College for 10-years, a pretty good gig that I feel quite fortunate to have. There are four full-time faculty, and several adjunct instructors, that the various FCS courses are divvied up amongst.

How we divvy the courses up is dependent upon educational background, professional experience, and personal interest. FCS is a rather broad area of study that encompasses early childhood education, nutrition, public health, workplace wellness, gerontology, human services, and a bit of sewing and cooking. A variety of skills, knowledge, and tools we humans can use in an attempt to be well across our lifespan as we crawl, trot, amble, and totter from cradle to grave.

About five years ago, one of our long-time adjuncts retired, leaving the Aging and Death course he had been teaching for many years without an instructor. Yes, there is a course called “Aging and Death”.

I was asked if I would be willing to give the course a go until we could find an adjunct, and five years later, I am still giving it a go. Going in, I never imagined that a class about getting old and dying would become my favorite course. Nor did I imagine that a bunch 20-year-olds would be interested in taking such a class, but it is full every semester.

For the course content, I have gathered information from various much-smarter-than-me-sources to cobble together what I hope to be a semesters worth of useful stuff. Hope…sometimes that’s the only hook left to hang one’s hat on. So it goes.

Us human folk seem to like stories, so the story I try to impart over the course of a semester is summed up with the acronym SCENES.

  • Social Connectivity
  • Cognitive Reserves
  • Exercise
  • Nutrition
  • Emotion Navigation
  • Stress Navigation

A movie is composed of various scenes, and if the majority of those scenes are of sufficient quality, the movie as a whole will most likely be enjoyable to watch and deemed a worthwhile investment of your time.

It costs money to go to a movie as well, but money comes and goes, time just goes. If one’s life were a movie, I assume one would want it to be good and to be long, to have sufficient quality and quantity. “Healthspan”, our quality of life, and “lifespan”, our quantity of life, both stand to benefit if we get our SCENES right. Good SCENES, good life.

The three components of healthspan, as expressed by Dr. Peter Attia; 1) Mind, 2) Body, and 3) Spirit, are each impacted, directly and/or indirectly, for better or for worse, dependent upon the quality, or lack thereof, of the SCENES we produce. Whereas, our lifespan, given all of the unknowns that we share space with as we move through life, is a bit more of a crapshoot.

I ask the students to think of themselves as a “Community of Yous” stretching through time. Presumably, one would want the “you” 10…20…30…40…50…or more years from now, to look back at you today appreciatively for the quality SCENES you’ve produced over the years, rather than regretfully.

We spend the semester exploring SCENES, exploring love and loss, exploring grief, exploring death with the hopes of learning how to live better.