An interesting story from earlier this year in the Australian news site The Age: an elementary school class in The Netherlands took on the project of constructing a real coffin to be used by their teacher, who is dying of cancer. The children participated voluntarily and with the approval of their parents, despite some controversy from a group of Belgian psychotherapists.
While it’s not hard to see this happening in Holland, where the culture is far more open and accepting of ideas that stretch the boundaries of society, I can only imagine the 24-7 shitstorm this would create if someone tried it in this country. As a culture, we have fetishized our fear of death to such a degree that we can’t begin to consider openly discussing or contemplating it among adults, let alone children. But I found this project to be a really thoughtful way to let these children have some context in which to think about death that didn’t have to be fraught with emotion or dripping in tragedy.
The article is from February of this year. It would be interesting to know if the teacher has since passed away (since the article makes it clear that she was very ill at the time) and how the children dealt with that.
Are the Belgian psychotherapists calling for an invasion?
She died February 19…
http://www.iederwijssomeren.nl/volw/iederwijzers/teksten/eri.htm