Professor Norma Bowe’s class has a three-year waiting list. It’s been profiled on MSNBC,  NPR, the Los Angeles Times and is the subject of a full-length book.  Professor Bowe teaches death. In Death and Perspective, Bowe takes students to crematoria, penitentiaries, hospices and funeral homes. The goal is to demystify death, shed light on life and have the types of taboo conversations we typically avoid. In that spirit, we’ve compiled some of our favorite wisdom from her 2014 Chicago Ideas Week talk.

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1. We have all been touched by death and loss.

“Imagine a room full of undergraduate students, first day of class. I ask a series of questions and three-quarters of the class raise their hand for each question and the questions go like this. How many of you know someone who died of a terminal illness? How many of you know someone who died in a car accident? How many of you know someone who is suicidal or who has committed suicide? And lastly, how many of you know someone who was murdered?”

2. Say and share goodbyes.

“The first assignment is to write a goodbye letter to someone or something you lost. Students write the papers and then read them to each other in class. There’s something very profound and powerful about looking into someone’s eyes and experiencing their grief with them.”

3. Try on a casket.

“Lisa’s brother died very tragically and suddenly, and she was devastated. But the thing that kept her up at night was not so much his death; she could wrap her head around that. The thing that kept her up was the casket. She was afraid of thinking of him in the casket. So, we walked into the  funeral home [on a field trip], and she said, ‘I want to try this casket on.’ So we helped her into it. She tried it on. She put the lid down. She spent a few minutes. And when she came out she said, ‘I’m no longer afraid of the casket. It’s peaceful in there.’”

4. Find love stories in a graveyard.

“Cemeteries are history lessons under our feet. I give students a scavenger hunt. They have 25 things they have to find. And one of those things is true love. To find it you have to look at the epitaphs, you have to look at the headstones and you can find out all kinds of things by looking at a person’s headstone.”

5. Make room for joy and play.

“When you have a student like Lindsey [who had a brain tumor] in your class, you have to add into your curriculum a beautiful fall day where you’re just playing in the leaves.”

6. Bring light.

“Sandy Hook happened in Connecticut not far from us, and we went there three days after the shootings because we heard that some kindergarteners were getting together with the surviving kindergarten teacher, and we ended up with these lanterns that light up. When the surviving kindergarteners came in with the surviving teacher, all they saw was light.”

7. People want to talk about death.

“Every book event [for The Death Class: A True Story about Life] is packed with people. Are people hungry to have a place to talk about death, grief and death anxiety? I would have to say yes.”