UF psychology senior Tarah Wood doesn't have a specific career plan, but she has nailed down a few details about her future.
She'll backpack across Europe, raise four children near the ocean and die at age 80.
When she dies, her daughter will give the eulogy and the marker on her grave will read "Live, Laugh, Love."
Wood isn't depressed, morbid or even the least bit gloomy - planning her death was part of a class assignment.
Sara Nash, a student professor, asks her students to think about their eventual demise in the death and dying assignment for Mindful Living, a course offered by the UF Center for Spirituality and Health.
Students must contemplate how they will live and die to write their eulogies, obituaries and epitaphs.
While many students are uneasy about the assignment at first, Nash has never heard a negative reaction from any of them.
Most, in fact, have embraced it.
A study in the November issue of Psychological Science offers a scientific explanation for this positive response. Contemplating your death will make you happier than usual, according to the study.
Wayne Griffin, associate director and clinical associate professor at the UF Counseling Center, said that consideration of mortality could free people to think more clearly about the meaning of the present.
"Maybe we need a balance between consideration of the ultimate question of our death and what it means to be actively alive and present to the moment," Griffin said.
The death and dying assignment was influenced by Eastern practices aimed at encouraging constructive living.
"The death and dying assignment is really a way of trying to bring more intentionality to our lives, because they're going to end," Nash said.
By the end of the assignment, Wood said she felt like she had prioritized her life.
"I was more moved by the assignment than I thought I would be," Wood said. "I look at death in a more positive way now."
