Jaureese Gaines ’16 and Maxine Solange Garcia ’16

As members of the 10-student Posse cohort that came to Pomona from Chicago high schools in 2012, Maxine and Jaureese say they feel more like brother and sister than mere friends.

“Simply put, when I use the word ‘Posse’ to describe my relationship with these nine amazing individuals, I’m actually describing my second family,” says Jaureese. “We’re not just a Posse; we are family. I love my four sisters and five brothers.”

As the group nears graduation, Maxine, a neuroscience major, is preparing for medical school, while Jaureese, a politics major with three summer internships in Washington, D.C., under his belt, is planning to return to Chicago to work on educational access. But they expect to stay close in the years ahead.

“We know we’ll all be invited to whatever engagement party, wedding, award ceremony or baby shower either one of us has,” Maxine says. “I also told Reese he’ll have to help me out during med school because of med school debt. Maybe I’ll move into his garage. But in all seriousness, I know that Reese, and all of Posse, will be there for me 20 years down the line, just like they were there for me these past four years.”

Stephen Glass ’57 and Sandra Dunkin Glass ’57

Steve and Sandy Glass don’t recall how they met. “Pomona was much smaller when we were there—like 700 or 800 students—and everybody knew everybody,” Sandy says. “So it wasn’t a question of meeting.”

However, they do remember very clearly their first two dates, during their sophomore year. “I asked him out first, to the Associated Women’s Formal,” Sandy says with a laugh.

“That’s right,” Steve agrees. “She asked me out and we had a very nice time. Then I asked her out—took her to the Academy Awards.”

As it happened, Steve’s father, who was in the movie business, didn’t need his Oscar tickets that year. Steve and Sandy double-dated with another Pomona student, Frank Capra Jr. ’55, who was then dating a young starlet named Anna Maria Alberghetti.

“Is that classy or what?” Steve asks.

“I came from Oregon,” Sandy retorts, “so the Academy Awards didn’t mean that much to me.”

The couple graduated from Pomona at about 4 p.m., June 16, 1957, and they were married in Little Bridges, in a traditional Jewish ceremony, three hours later. “After all, the whole family was already there, so why waste it?” Steve says.

The secret of their 58 years together? “I like what she likes, and she likes what I like,” Steve explains. “We had a good education at Pomona, and we always have a lot to talk about.”

Neuroscience Professor Nicole Weekes and Vivian Carrillo ’16

“I met Nicole Weekes when I took Neuropsychology my sophomore year,” Vivian remembers. “She has this contagious excitement when she lectures that makes you interested in whatever she is talking about.”

Their relationship progressed from teacher-student to mentor-mentee when Vivian asked Nicole to be her thesis advisor. “I knew her work and was pulled in by her commitment to students,” Vivian explains. “One of the best things about her, and sort of an inside joke between us, is that when I get too ambitious about my work, she says, ‘Save that for your dissertation.’ And while it seems like a joking way to tell me to slow down, it’s reassuring. Hearing her say that reminds me that I can have a future in this field and that I am capable.”

For her part, Nicole says the benefits of mentoring flow both ways. “I love to see my students grow intellectually, personally, socially. It is such an honor for me to get to mentor them in any and all of these arenas. As so many people say about mentoring, I know that I get at least as much back from these relationships as my students do. So, how could I ever say no? It is one of the most important and fulfilling parts of my job. I am honored to watch students like Vivian just continue to rise.”

Viraj Singh ’19 and Jonathan Wilson ’19

Pomona puts a lot of work into pairing first-year roommates, but as we all know, it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes, however, the result is golden. Viraj values Jonathan’s fun-loving spontanaeity, and Jonathan appreciates Viraj’s sense of humor. “He’s a go-to funny guy in our hall,” Jonathan says, “and has been known to drop unexpected comments that make everyone in a room keel over in laughter.”

But it’s not just laughter. “In October, my best friend from high school passed away from neuroblastoma,” Jonathan says. “Viraj never pressured me into talking about it or made it about him, but was willing to listen when I wanted to talk. That’s the best I could have asked for in a friend.”

“When you are put in a room with someone else,” Viraj says, “it’s rewarding to be able to talk about anything and truly feel comfortable around him.” Before they go to bed at night, he says, they will often debrief, talking through the significant parts of the day. “It serves as a mini-therapy,” he says.

Ed Tessier ’91 and Professor Emeritus of Sociology Bob Herman ’51

Bob likes to say he learned more from students like Ed than they learned from him. Ed’s response: “He changed my life.”

An activist since his Pomona days, Ed uses his role as a city planner and developer to make neighborhoods more livable, downtowns livelier, the arts more visible and public places more accessible. “He’s taken the things I was teaching and used them,” Bob says.”He’s a practitioner. He’s doing things. I was just talking in front of a class.”

“We had lunch last week to debate this,” Ed says. “I didn’t know it at the time, but a lot of what Bob was preaching was actually very edgy in the field. When I went out as an activist and was quoting Jane Jacobs and siding with the new urbanists, the development community around here marked me as a real rabble-rousing radical. Now they’ve all changed their tune. This is the new orthodox. So Bob gave me a good 25-year head start on the rest of the field.”

Cesar Meza ’16 and Draper Center Director Maria Tucker

Cesar was 14 years old when he first met Maria as a student in the Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS). “We were in the Wig lobby when I first introduced myself to her,” he recalls. “Before I could even finish saying my name she told me what city I was from and what high school I went to.”

Years later, when he was accepted as a Pomona College first-year, he already knew he wanted to work at the Draper Center. Since then, the Center—and Maria—have continued to play a huge role in his education. “I would not be the active student I am today without her guidance and support,” he says. “She has helped me navigate through difficult situations and given me the motivation to overcome any obstacles.”

For her part, Maria says the chance to mentor smart, caring students like Cesar is one of the biggest perks of the job. “For me, these relationships keep alive the notion that education transforms lives as well as communities,” she says.

Jamila Espinosa ’16 and Lucia Ruan ’16

Jamila and Lucia met at Women’s Union during their first year, but their friendship didn’t really blossom until the following summer, when they began to exchange thoughts and experiences over Facebook, a habit they continue to this day.

“Lucia is one of the most thoughtful people I know.” Jamila says. “Whether it be finals week, or Christmas, or Valentine’s Day, or your birthday, you can count on some type of recognition from her. She is the master of planning surprise parties. She also knows where to find the funniest memes on the Internet, and I especially admire her fashion sense. In short, she is fabulous on the inside and out.”

Lucia describes Jamila as “a huge support in my life and someone I share almost everything with. Even this past weekend, I was feeling incredibly down, and she came into my room and kept me company, waiting for the moment I was ready to share what was bothering me and offering suggestions that push me in the right direction towards taking care of myself.”

Richard Bookwalter ’82 and Galen Leung ’82

Richard and Galen recall meeting as first-year students who had been elected as members of the Freshman Dorm Council, representing Walker (Galen) and Oldenborg (Richard). Early in the second semester, the group threw a Survivors’ Party for students who had made it through the first half of the year, and afterwards, Richard says, “we were the only two who showed up on the cleaning committee.”

Over the next couple of years, they mostly went their separate ways—different dorms, different majors, different groups of friends. But after Galen returned from a junior year semester in Washington, D.C., and Richard returned from a semester abroad in Geneva, Switzerland, the two met again at a Gay Student Union meeting, and by the end of their senior year, the two knew they wanted to be together.

Three decades later, they’re still together, and on August 30, 2008, they were married.

“I think our relationship has lasted over 34 years because we are able to communicate with each other,” Galen says. “I love Richard because he’s the best—intelligent, feeling and concerned about the world, himself and others. His perspective and empathy help me relax and enjoy the moment and the world around me.”

Shadiah Sigala ’06 and Kaneisha Grayson ’06

Shadiah and Kaneisha now live almost 2,000 miles apart, but at heart, they’re always closer. “Kaneisha is one of my life partners,” Shadiah says. “There are a handful of those people in my life—including my husband, mom and daughter—and Kaneisha makes it on the short list.”

The two met during a first-year seminar class, but it wasn’t until the following semester that they became close. During a trip to Washington, D.C., Kaneisha came up to Shadiah and said, with her usual directness, “You’re going to be my friend.”

“I thought, ‘Who is this bold, confident woman?’” Shadiah remembers. They soon discovered that they were much alike, though Shadiah thought of Kaneisha as “a more advanced version of me.” She adds: “Truthfully, she showed me all that I was capable of doing, simply by being herself.”

Now, Kaneisha says, the shoe is on the other foot as she learns from her friend’s experiences in life and work. “I love how Shadiah can tackle very difficult things,” she says, “planning a wedding, being married, working a demanding job, being a mom, even looking for a startup job during a brutal recession, while staying very positive and still engaging in self-care. Having a close friend go through many life events just a bit before you do—and report back the truth of how it’s simultaneously not as bad and way harder than others make it seem—is very encouraging and uplifting.”

Dan Stoebel ’00 and Biology Professor Daniel Martínez

Daniel Martínez joined the Pomona faculty in 1997, and Dan was one of his first student researchers. “His project was very hard,” Daniel recalls. “I can’t believe we did manual gene sequencing using radiation, but at the time, it was the only way.”

“What made Daniel unique was that he treated us like colleagues,” says Dan, who went on to follow in Daniel’s footsteps, earning his Ph.D. at the same institution, SUNY Stony Brook, and becoming a professor of biology at neighboring Harvey Mudd College.

“Daniel told us quite honestly that much of the material was not his field of expertise, and this turned out to be valuable. Daniel was not an authority, but rather modeled how those who know how to learn go about doing it. As he struggled with us to understand a poorly explained experiment, or a seemingly contradictory result, we got to watch a professional scientist in the process of intellectual exploration. In putting himself on the line for us, in making himself vulnerable to failure with us, Daniel was a role model for the type of learning that we all have to do after we graduate. I am profoundly grateful for his willingness to do so.”

Michelle Chan ’17 and Sophia Sun ’18

When Sophia was trying to decide between Pomona and two big universities, she introduced herself in a post on the Facebook page for each institution. The warm and welcoming response from Pomona students, including Michelle, convinced her that Pomona was where she belonged. “Even through Facebook,” she says, “I could tell that Michelle was incredibly warm, passionate, and curious—an initial impression that has been wholly confirmed by all my interactions with her.”

“We’re both perpetually awestruck with gratitude in our landing at Pomona,” Michelle says. “and we feed off each other’s energy in our passion for more. Sophia has taught me how to embrace life head-on and not waste a single opportunity to learn and reflect.”

Spirits of Saturn was a fine, white powder that 17th-century women smoothed into their skin. Also known as Venetian ceruse, it hid smallpox scars, spots and blemishes, transforming faces into a fashionable pallor. It also slowly poisoned the wearer—it was made of powdered lead.

Over time, the powder caused teeth to rot, hairlines to recede and, in a particularly cruel twist of irony, the skin to shrivel and turn gray. Yet, for hundreds of years, European and Asian women dabbed lead on their faces. It’s not even the most unsavory preparation that women have used to whiten their skin. Ancient Roman women used crocodile dung; Japanese women preferred nightingale droppings.

Women have been powdering their cheeks, lining their eyes and rouging their lips for nearly all of recorded history. The story of makeup may begin even earlier—stores of red ochre found in Paleolithic caves suggest humans have been painting their skin for 100,000 years.

While ideals of beauty change over time and across cultures, some elements are nearly universal: fair, unblemished skin, ruby lips, alluring eyes. Psychologist Richard Russell ’97, who studies the biological underpinnings of beauty, believes he has figured out why.

Through a series of elegantly-designed experiments, Russell has proved that women’s faces have greater contrast than men’s. It’s as if Mother Nature applied an Instagram filter to the female face to make the eyes and mouth pop out from the rest of the features. And this contrast, Russell discovered, appears at puberty and ebbs at menopause, making it a marker of fertility.

In other words, Russell solved a riddle nearly as old as humanity. Why do women wear makeup? To look more feminine and more fertile. “There’s a lot of information we get from a face—age, health, sex, race, trustworthiness,” he says. “There are judgments that we make, even though we’re taught not to make them.”

Russell is not what you might picture when you think of a makeup scholar. The 40-year-old Gettysburg College professor is partial to plaid shirts and wire-rimmed glasses. He spends his free time hiking with his kids, not perusing the counters at Sephora. Even his wife, Carrie Russell, an attorney and novelist, doesn’t wear much makeup, Russell says. “Part of how I study this is I have an outsider’s viewpoint,” he says. “I don’t put that much work into my appearance.”

Russell’s interest in perception began during his undergrad days at Pomona, where he majored in neuroscience. Working on a student mural project sparked an interest in art, and Russell decided he wanted to study how the mind perceives beauty.

He received a doctorate in cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then joined a post-doc program at Harvard. It was there that Russell made his first major contribution to the understanding of facial perception.

Russell was studying prosopagnosics, people who are exceptionally bad at recognizing faces (the term comes from the Greek words for “face” and “ignorance.” Prosopagnosics are unable to identify co-workers, friends, and, in the most extreme cases, their own spouses.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote extensively about prosopagnosia, a condition with which he himself was afflicted. In an essay, he recounted being unable to recognize his own psychoanalyst when passing him in the lobby after a session. On another occasion, a woman he had been sharing a waiting room with informed him that she was his longtime assistant. She had been waiting to see if he could recognize her without prompting.

While some prosopagnosics, such as Sacks, apparently suffer from a hereditary condition, others lose the ability to recognize faces after an accident or illness. Scientists believe that a portion of the right side of the visual cortex, known as the fusiform face area, is primarily responsible for facial recognition.

As Russell studied people who had problems recognizing faces, he began to wonder if there were others who were exceptionally good at recognizing them. While researchers had traditionally thought facial recognition was a skill that people either possessed or lacked, Russell had a hunch that it was an ability that lay on a spectrum.

One of Russell’s subjects had told him of a friend who had an extraordinary talent for remembering faces. This young man recognized people he had glimpsed at a concert years ago. He had a mental library of extras from TV shows and movies. Russell devised a test to spot exceptional facial recognition ability. He administered it to his subject’s friend, and others, and discovered that there were indeed people who had an innate talent for identifying faces. In a 2009 paper, Russell announced the existence of such people and coined a term for them: super-recognizers.

Just as prosopagnosics often describe faking recognition to avoid embarrassment, super-recognizers admit to hiding their talents, Russell says. They learn, over time, that acquaintances can be creeped out when they say they remember passing them on the street years earlier.

Russell’s discovery has led him to question what other cognitive abilities exist on a spectrum.

“There’s an assumption in experimental psychology that we’re all the same,” he says. With the exception of personality and intelligence, most characteristics are assumed to be either-or. You have them, or you don’t. But if there is a spectrum for facial recognition, perhaps one exists for other abilities as well.

Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcoff, who also studies the biological basis of beauty, says Russell’s work challenges the field’s established notions. “He’ll take a known finding and make you think about it in a different way,” she says. Russell is a “creative, thoughtful and rigorous researcher,” whose research has inspired some of her own recent work, she says.

Richard Russell ’97 works with a student in his lab at Gettysburg College.

While many think of beauty as a subjective construct, Etcoff argues in her book, Survival of the Prettiest, that we are primed to find certain evolutionarily adaptive traits attractive.

Studies show that attractive faces meet certain criteria. They’re symmetrical. They’re youthful. They’re sexually dimorphic—males are manly and females are womanly. And, they’re—well—average.

The first three criteria aren’t really surprising; all signal fertility. But what does the fourth mean? When scientists blend together images of many faces, people find the composite much more attractive than any of the other faces. These “average” faces mimic our own mental images of the archetypal male and female face.

That female face, it’s important to mention, is lighter than the male face—women are, quite literally, the fairer sex. Regardless of ethnic group or skin color, women’s faces reflect 3 percent more light than their male counterparts. The contrast is most noticeable during young adulthood, and fades with age.

According to one hypothesis, women have paler skin during their fertile years so that they can more easily synthesize vitamin D3, which helps absorb the calcium a developing fetus needs.

To test his theory on facial contrast, Russell showed a series of male and female composite faces to subjects. He decreased the contrast for some of them. When subjects saw female faces with less contrast, they ranked them as less attractive. But the opposite was true for male faces—subjects thought the men grew more attractive when their eyes and lips stood out less.

For other photos, Russell increased the contrast between the eyes and lips and surrounding skin. Subjects said that this made the female faces more attractive, while the male faces became less so.

Russell then morphed together images of men and women, creating an androgynous face. Again, he tweaked the level of contrast. When subjects saw the androgynous face with a high level of contrast, they said it appeared to be a woman. But when they saw the same face with a low level of contrast, they said it appeared to be a man. Russell then conducted follow-up experiments that showed that reducing the level of contrast in a woman’s face made her look older.

So how does all of this relate to the cosmetics counter? Women use makeup to darken their eyelids and brows, to hide skin imperfections and to add color to their lips and cheeks. In other words, as Russell also demonstrated in a 2009 paper, makeup increases facial contrast. By making their eyes and lips pop, women make themselves look younger and more feminine, and, therefore, more attractive.

Etcoff made headlines a few years ago with a study that showed people perceive women wearing makeup as not only more attractive, but more competent and trustworthy. What we tend to think of as a “natural look,” is actually a face that has been subtly embellished with makeup.

“Women use makeup similarly across time and cultures,” Russell says. “I’m trying to marry the knowledge of perceptions of human attractiveness with what people have been doing for thousands of years to enhance their faces. We could learn a lot about makeup by applying this psychological research.” Chanel, the century-old French cosmetics company, seems to think so too, since it’s currently funding some of Russell’s research.

In the future, Russell is interested in delving into other aspects of appearance. After all, people have been styling their hair and covering their bodies for at least as long as they have been painting their skin. What do we reveal—and hide—about our evolutionary fitness through clothing and hair?

“Some people think a core aspect of what makes us human is altering our appearance,” Russell says.

Eddie Murphy (times three)

If the surreality of being on a plane with Elizabeth Taylor en route to Paris for the Cannes Film Festival and then being whisked away in a limo with her upon landing isn’t memorable enough, picture this: Elizabeth Taylor making the limo driver pull over on the tarmac so she could let her little Maltese out to do its business. This is a celebrity photographer’s eye view—and one moment you really wish you had on film, according to Michael Larsen ’89.

But Larsen has snapped a million other moments and more photos of famous faces than you can count. Name a Hollywood star and he’s probably captured them on his camera. Brad Pitt. Halle Berry. Clint Eastwood. Cate Blanchett. Since 1997, the celebrity portraiture and lifestyle photography of husband and wife team Larsen and Tracy Talbert—they met in high school when he was the yearbook photographer and she was the school newspaper photographer—have appeared worldwide in magazines like People, Esquire, InStyle, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, and for commercial clients like NBC, Fox, Bravo and Warner Brothers.

Michael Douglas

Keira Knightley

Larsen’s childhood dream was to be a filmmaker—he adored “Star Wars”—and he learned the principles of filmmaking through still photography. He was 14 when he got his first camera, an Olympus OM1 35mm, and he went on to work as a photographer for the yearbook throughout high school and The Student Life while at Pomona. He was never without his camera and was always in the darkroom, he says. “It was a constant, daily practice for me.”

After graduation he set out on his pursuit of a film career but realized after a grueling two years that this wasn’t what he wanted to do after all, he says.

Tom Hanks

“I looked around at the career paths of the crew and camera people and it looked pretty depressing in terms of their personal lives,” he says, thanks to long brutal hours that he saw taxed families.

A photography workshop Larsen attended in upstate New York led to a conversation, which led to an invitation, which led to a pivot. He talked to Douglas Kirkland, one of the first modern celebrity portrait photographers, who told him about the role of photo assistants. Larsen remembers thinking, “Wait a minute, what is that? That’s a job?”

Kirkland invited him to a shoot with Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” and Larsen, after seeing how professional celebrity shoots happen, was hooked and decided then this was the path for him. “I was just completely taken. It was kind of like filmmaking in that you’re building sets and creating worlds, but you’re doing it in a five-hour period, instead of months and days,” says Larsen.

Tilda Swinton

His first gig was a teddy bears shoot for a toy catalog but over the course of seven years his experience expanded to assisting the biggest names in the field like Annie Leibovitz, Nigel Parry, Kirkland and Firooz Zahedi (Larsen helped him with the now iconic movie poster for “Pulp Fiction”).

Larsen says Leibovitz influenced him greatly with the artistic style she would bring to her shoots: whether putting Demi Moore in body paint, dumping Whoopi Goldberg in a tub of milk, or asking John Lennon to be naked and hug Yoko Ono on the floor. (To this day Larsen wonders about Lennon and Ono’s initial reactions to that request.)

Larsen and Talbert have spent two decades building that kind of creative trust with celebrities and, now more than in bygone eras, also with stars’ publicists, who do the initial vetting and then often give the final yay or nay. From his very first shoot Larsen says he realized that celebrity photography isn’t just about taking a nice picture; it’s about psychology and politics as well.

Matthew McConaughey

Jane Lynch

As soon as a subject arrives on set, the face is the first place his eyes go. Lighting changes are made accordingly and wardrobes are assessed based on body types.

“Celebrities are actually very vulnerable at this point,” says Larsen. “A bad photographer or a magazine with an agenda could make them look bad intentionally if they wanted. We made a decision a long time ago that we were in the business for the long run, and so it’s incredibly important that we treat our subjects with respect and not violate the trust they put in us.”

Ben Affleck

(“Every once in awhile you get a subject who is so stunningly beautiful they look great no matter what. Halle Berry was one of those,” he says.)

If all goes well there is that magic click, when the shutter release button meets “a moment, a pose, the light, where you think to yourself, ‘That’s it!’ Anything you get after that is just gravy,” he explains.

Ray Charles

But often, he says, you don’t see the magic until after the fact. “Sometimes during the shoot I think, ‘Wow, this person is really a dud, nothing going on at all,’ and then you start looking through the pictures and realize they were doing something very subtle and intense and they actually gave you a gift,” he says. “That’s the fun of photography: discovering what you really captured later, after all the rigmarole of the shoot has passed and you’re just sitting with the images in front of you. Sometimes that same discovery can come years later when you’re looking back through the shoots.”

And then there are the shoots that go awry. They had 10 minutes with Jodie Foster when Larsen realized he had accidentally shot in multiple exposure and all the photos were on one frame. He threw his back out completely on a shoot with Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon and was unable to stand, so Talbert put the camera on a tripod, focused, and Larsen just pushed the button. Both times they still got the money shot.

Hugh Jackman

Cameron Diaz

Then of course, there are the difficult, er, quirky celebrities. The hardest session he recalls was with Christopher Walken. “As we were shooting, if we wanted him to look at the camera, we had to say ‘look.’ I said ‘look.’ He’d look at the camera for one frame, and then look away. He insisted that we say ‘look’ for every frame that we wanted him to look at the camera. Eventually, we got into a rhythm, but it threw me off at first.”

LeBron James

The smoothest shoot? Brad Pitt. “I had worked with him back in the early ’90s on a movie called Cool World. He hadn’t quite exploded yet and liked to hang out with the crew instead of hiding in his RV like the other big actors. When we did the shoot, he was the same laid-back guy. No fuss. But when he left the studio after our shoot, his car got attacked by paparazzi as it was pulling away. It was hard to watch that. We had a lot of sympathy for him and the price he pays for fame.”

Tracy Talbert and MIchael Larsen (photo by Luke & Ada Larsen)

Celebrities are just normal people who happen to have really interesting jobs, says Larsen. And they make his work interesting as well. “We’re very lucky to be able to get to spend some time with these folks and get a glimpse into their world, which is creative and at the leading edge of our culture. I think that’s the most rewarding part: a front row seat to American culture —the transcendent and the infamous, but distinctly American. It’s a privilege,” he says.

“The fact that I get paid to do this makes me feel very grateful and a little guilty.”

(Photos Copyright Larsen&Talbert)

Most of the people gathered around the card tables at the Senior Center in Longmont, Colo., this morning seem to be my age or older—in their 60s or 70s. They sit three or four to a table and peek at their cards, as I do at mine.

Unlike most card games, GoWish gives each player a full deck—cards bearing no diamonds or spades, no aces or deuces. Just words. Words like: “To be mentally aware.” And “Not to be connected to machines.” And “To be at peace with God.”

The object here isn’t winning—it’s understanding. By organizing our cards into numbered priorities, we’re all seeking to come to grips with the nitty-gritty of our own mortality—that is, to decide how we would prefer to die.

As I shuffle through my cards and grapple with my own priorities (Do I want to be free from pain more than I want the chance to see my close friends one last time? Should I rank having my financial affairs in order above having a doctor I trust?), my host, Peggy Arnold ’65 wanders from table to table, asking probing questions and offering nuggets of information about the world of modern death. Just starting the process of talking about the subject, she says, is therapeutic—taking us back to a day when death was a visible part of life.

“Death in our culture has become a medical event, not a personal experience,” she says. “It used to be that children would run in and out of the parlor when the body was lying there. Or people grew up on farms, where life and death were always present.” Modern death, she says, is often hidden away behind hospital curtains, and most people have no clue what awaits them there.

At my table, one person picks as her top priority “To be free from anxiety.” Another chooses “To have an advocate who knows my values and priorities.” I settle on “To have my family with me.”

In each case, it soon becomes clear that there are personal    experiences behind the choice. The person who wants to be free from anxiety explains that her mother spent weeks before her death in a terrible state of fear. The person who hopes for an advocate worries about having no one she can trust. It only occurs to me afterward that my own choice might have something to do with the fact that both my parents died suddenly, without a chance to say goodbye.

“What’s really interesting about that game,” Arnold says, “is what happens when people have a discussion about why they chose what they chose. Really, it’s a values clarification game.”

Taking Back Dying

For Arnold, the program coordinator for Longmont United Hospital’s AgeWell program, this game, and the reflections and conversations it prompts, are also part of a larger movement—a grass-roots crusade that has been spreading across the country for the past few years. The goal: to reclaim death from the medical establishment and empower people to make choices about how they wish to spend their final days.

“To me, what’s exciting is that people are starting to take back their own death and dying process,” she says. “Look at everything that goes on around birth—all the joy and the care, the respect and the dignity that goes on. But on the other end of the conveyor belt, this hasn’t been happening.”

Today, medical technology can prolong life almost indefinitely, but as Arnold points out, in too many cases that has simply prolonged suffering and turned the end of life into a horror show. “Most people—there are always exceptions, but most people—are not going to want to go out of this life hooked to beeping machines, with tubes everywhere,” she says.

Like the Advanced Directives class she teaches at the Senior Center, this game of GoWish is intended to help participants think clearly about their options while there’s still time. Arnold likes to quote Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ellen Goodman, the founder of The Conversation Project, who said: “It’s always too soon, until it’s too late.”

Since 2010, The Conversation Project has been focusing on encouraging people to have a conversation with their loved ones about their end-of-life wishes. That, however, is only one of the visible prongs of this burgeoning movement. Another is the Death Cafés, which sprang up in the United Kingdom, also in 2010, and have now spread across the United States, offering people a forum for freewheeling discussions of death and dying over cookies or a slice of cake. Then there’s the Green Burial movement, which seeks to reclaim the long-lost right of natural burial, without embalming or caskets or concrete vaults to inhibit the natural recycling process. And at the heart of it all, there’s an increasing number of activist physicians like Dr. Angelo Volandes, author of The Conversation, and Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal, who are seeking to change the ethos of end-of-life care by pulling back the curtain on hospital death and challenging both their fellow doctors and the public to look at the subject differently.

Peggy Arnold ’65 adds her wish to the “Before I Die” Wall at the Art Museum of the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In the area around Longmont and Boulder, Arnold is at the center of a small but determined community of end-of-life reformers whom she dubs, with affection and “M*A*S*H”-style humor, “the Deathies.” There’s Kim Mooney, an experienced end-of-life counselor and certified thanatologist (death scholar) who recently started her own company, called Practically Dying. There’s Bart Windrum, who, following the disastrous hospital experiences of his two dying parents, was moved to write Notes from the Waiting Room, a guide book for families of the terminally ill. There’s retired emergency room physician Jean Abbott, who is urging her fellow doctors to get over their squeamishness about removing patients from life-prolonging equipment when the outcome is no longer in doubt.

What the Deathies all have in common is that they’re passionate about returning control over the end of life to the dying and their families.

One Death

For her part, Arnold says death has always seemed an integral part of her life. Her mother’s father died two months before she was born, and she suspects that her mother’s grief may have affected her in the womb. One of her first playgrounds in her hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, was a cemetery where she played among the tombstones of runaway slaves. Then there was her grandfather’s suicide by walking in front of a train here in Claremont. “I could go on and on with all these experiences of death,” she says. “So it’s really no surprise that it’s been a theme for me. Maybe not THE theme, but it’s definitely been part of the story.”

Having worked as a hospice volunteer before taking her current job 15 years ago, she says the part of her work that relates to “the death trade” just evolved naturally. “You could call it ‘unbidden,’” she says. “It just appeared, and I was the one who was asked to do it.”

First she was designated as the hospital representative to a short-lived organization called the Front Range End of Life, which focused on creating resources for the terminally ill. Then the hospital decided to do a video about planning for the end of life, and guess who got the job? Then they needed someone to teach a class on advanced directives… “It’s like the underground of aspen groves,” she says. “Their root systems go on for acres and keep shooting up new stems. The time for this had come, and I happened to be in the middle of the grove.”

Then, five years ago, her focus on death and dying took a turn for the personal. An old friend, Mogens Baungaard Thomsen—a Danish exchange student in her high school who had become a vascular surgeon in Sweden—revealed that he was living with a death sentence—kidney cancer that had metastasized to his lungs.

“We just started Skyping a lot and had the most fascinating conversations,” Arnold says. “At some point, I said, ‘Mo, I’d love to record what you’re saying. I think it is so wise.’ He was a physician. He was a widower. Now he was facing his own end.”

So they made a video together about his experience of dying. “He talked about all the adventures he’d had in his life, like being with headhunters in New Guinea, and how everything he did was just a new adventure,” she says. “Sometimes it was scary, but he knew that was part of who he was. He loved all those adventures. And so, he was looking at death as the next adventure.”

Peggy Arnold ’65 at her desk with a photo of Mogens Thomsen and his granddaughter.

At the time, Thomsen didn’t expect to live long enough to see his new grandchild, but he outlived his own prognosis. “There’s a picture of them together,” Arnold says, pointing to a photo pinned above her desk of Thomsen holding his granddaughter. “And he actually lived almost two years longer.”

During that time, they made two more videos together. The first, prompted by Thomsen’s terrible experiences with the Swedish healthcare system, is aimed at his fellow doctors, giving them heart-felt advice on how to relate to people who are dying.

The second, made shortly before his death, is less philosophical, more practical and more emotionally raw—what he wants for his last meal (a cheeseburger or maybe fish and chips); what music he would like to hear on his deathbed (a piece by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy that he listened to with his wife while she was dying); what he wants on his epitaph (“I don’t want one”).

The exchanges between Thomsen and Arnold sound at times like an interview, at times like old friends chatting, at times like therapy. “Although I’ve seen so many people die, I still don’t know what goes on at the end,” Thomsen reflects at one point. “As long as I’m aware of what’s going on, I would probably want to cling to my relatives and have them with me, but that’s a very egoistic way of thinking. I don’t think it’s a pleasure for them to see me die.”

“You could ask,” Arnold gently suggests. “It may not be a pleasure, but it may be important.”

“You’re right,” Thomsen says. “I hadn’t even thought of asking. Thank you.”

Four months later, when Thomsen finally reached what he called his “expiration date,” both of his sons were at his side.

“As it turned out, he had a medical emergency, went to the hospital, and though he would never have wanted to die there, that’s exactly what happened,” Arnold recalls. “And it was probably the best thing, as it turned out, because a really good friend who was a doctor was able to be there to make sure everything was going to happen the way Mo would want it. And it meant that his two sons could actually be there.”

It’s About Life

In the end, Arnold says, her experience with Thomsen taught her something important—not about death, but about life.

“What we learned from him is that, first of all, we do need to be looking at death face to face. No one should tell anybody else how to do this, but I think there’s a lot to gain from looking at it—not just at the end, but in relation to the end. What is life about? What is today about? Tomorrow isn’t here yet, so what do I want my life to be about today? That, to me, is the goal of doing this work.”

In the end, as much as we may avoid the subject, we all have our own expiration dates—we just don’t know what they are yet. Arnold sometimes wonders how she would respond to a terminal diagnosis herself. Would her work still have meaning? Would she find joy in little things, as her friend Mo did at the end?

In the meantime, she continues to teach her classes and organize events and counsel seniors who come to her for advice. And she continues to let her involvement with death inform her thinking about life.

“Advanced directives are just documents,” she says. “The medical people need them. But what’s interesting to me is the thought that has to go into them. So that means people have to look at what their values are, what their beliefs are, what their goals in life are, what quality of life means to them, all of these things. If they’re really thinking about it and taking it seriously, they’ve got to look death in the face and figure out what their relationship is to it. And that means, ‘What’s your relationship to life?’”