Beloved professor who taught death and dying faces terminal illness

At 93, DeAnn Kalich is still known at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for teaching students how to think about death, bereavement and the social meaning of loss. Now, as she faces a terminal illness, the professor who spent decades asking others to confront mortality is offering one last lesson herself, in conversation with former student and CBS News contributor David Begnaud.

Kalich’s course, SOCI 480G, examines individual and collective death-related attitudes, expectations and behaviors, with emphasis on the social implications of death and dying. Former students have long described it less as a grim academic exercise than a course about life and living, and UL Lafayette has said Kalich approaches the material through a social-psychological lens that includes modern Western and cross-cultural views of death and bereavement.

That message came from someone who knew the subject personally. Kalich has said she took the death and dying class herself as an undergraduate at UL Lafayette before later teaching it. She began teaching the course in 1998 and moved it online in 2017, making room for students who could engage with the material outside a traditional classroom. She has also said she takes care to support students who may be triggered by the subject matter.

In a UL Lafayette profile, Kalich said the class helps students stop living on autopilot and focus on the present, because regret and the “if-onlies and what-ifs” are among the worst parts of death. That perspective gives her final lesson a broader public-health resonance: when Americans avoid talking about dying, families are often forced to learn caregiving, grief and end-of-life decision-making in the middle of a crisis, with little preparation and even less support.

Begnaud, who joined CBS News in 2015 and has reported across the network’s broadcasts and platforms, brought the story full circle by interviewing the professor who once taught him. UL Lafayette currently lists Kalich as faculty and department head in Sociology, Anthropology, and Human Development & Family Science, as well as interim department head of Political Science. Her life’s work now stands as a reminder that death education is not only about the end of life; it is about how people live, care for one another and face loss with more honesty and less fear.