"Death, that hidden teacher who teaches what really matters", begins Calixto Herrera, technician of the School Health and Healthy Lifestyles Area of the Ministry of Education of the Canary Islands and promoter of the project Colored Caterpillars and Butterflies. This project works to bring the reality of death to the classrooms of the Canary Islands educational centers from an educational perspective.
"We cannot say that a school educates for life, ignoring this reality that is death", says Calixto Herrera. This project, which started in 2013, cannot be understood without understanding that death is a taboo subject in Spain and also in the Canary Islands. "We are in a consumerist society, in a culture that sells us a feeling of almost toxic happiness, where everything is achieved and where pain in adversity is expelled as if it were a system failure", begins the technician.
Faced with this trend, the Caterpillars and Butterflies initiative tries to educate and raise awareness among students, their families and teachers of the centers of all the griefs that a minor may go through, training them in the reality of loss. In this case, they do it from two branches: normalization and palliative education.
Thus, "the normalizing aspect is prior to the appearance of a real death. We work with theoretical aspects related to death, dying, grief and everything that means accompanying in situations of adversity".
While the palliative appears when there is a real death in the minor's environment. "Whatever the type of death, we directly accompany the centers, advising, giving them keys and orientations", explains the technician of the School Health and Healthy Lifestyles Area of the Ministry.
Children and their concern about death
The technician relates that death is a topic that affects minors. "What the research tells us is that children, even before speaking, are concerned about the disappearance of our loved ones, where they go", he explains. However, Western society uses euphemisms or silences to respond to this pain. That is where the importance of educating about death arises.
To act in an educational center, the Colored Caterpillars and Butterflies project is activated by the educational centers or from the Inspection teams, on occasions, in the event of the death of an important person in the minor's life. In this case, the interventions that are carried out are educational, not clinical or therapeutic.
Calixto Herrera: "Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road, but is part of the reality of children and a topic that concerns them"
How to inform a child of the death of a loved one?
This educator recommends that whenever a minor is to be informed of the death of a loved one, it should be done by a person who is emotionally close to the child and quickly. "It should always be someone from the family or very close", explains Herrera. That first shock, when the minor receives the news, will be remembered throughout their life.
"We start from the premise that when a child or adolescent experiences the loss of a significant loved one, they will feel a natural pain", adds Calixto Herrera. The initiative aims to capture the naturalness of a grieving process, where pain, "far from being a disease or something pathological, is part of the process".
At this point, he emphasizes the importance of accompaniment in that pain and suffering. "We have to open a space for communication with them. Sometimes we forget that children are participating in a grieving process and they have to be recognized in their role", he advises.
In addition, it is important in this space that there is an environment of trust, such as physical and emotional security. Secondly, they should be made to feel included in the process. "Listen to what children say, not only verbally, but also from their silence or from attachment behaviors", he says. In many occasions, minors hide from the pain, behind behaviors in which they are apparently well and it is important to give them tools to detect it.
The grief of adolescents and children
Calixto Herrera shows that grief in adolescents is more similar to that of adults. "It is quite similar, with the nuances that this stage entails, such as change, the search for identity, hormonal, intellectual or mental changes", he exemplifies.
At the same time, he points out that in children, from kindergarten to sixth grade, they have not yet acquired the concept of death as such.
"They do not handle the concept of death itself as a word nor do they understand it in depth, but what they do understand is that my loved one, that mother who held me in her arms or that father who kissed me is no longer there and they deeply feel that absence", narrates Herrera.
It is from the age of nine or ten that the minor begins to understand this concept of death in a broader way, with the irreversibility and universality that it entails. For example, they understand that "all living beings die at some point and that once you die you cannot come back", he specifies. As advice, in the face of a child's grief, Herrera recommends avoiding abrupt changes in their life and maintaining the routine and schedules. While, although adolescents need that availability of adult people, they also need other spaces to reflect individually.
Loss beyond death
Colored Caterpillars and Butterflies not only tackles the loss due to death with minors. "When we talk about loss, we are not only referring to the death of loved ones to what is death, but we are also talking about other types of losses, of objects, of value projects", explains Calixto Herrera.
At this point, he gives the example of the situation of a family of migrants, which is broken by the separation. "One part in one country and another in another", he adds, "we also have children whose parents are imprisoned".
"We call it the 'Colored Caterpillars and Butterflies' project because there are multiple faces that we have in the classrooms with pain and when we see all this diversity that we face, what is under all this, there is pain and suffering and that is the great challenge, how to look at suffering", reflects Calixto.
Suicidal behaviors
Regarding the possible increase in self-harming behaviors in the Canary Islands. Herrera relates that there are different investigations underway, but it cannot be affirmed for the moment an increase in suicidal behavior. What does exist is a "greater sensitivity and awareness" since we left the confinement by the coronavirus. "It is an old reality that goes back many years before the pandemic and all this since 2014 the World Health Organization already told us that we were facing an imperative of public health that had increased by 60% in the last 50 years", he adds.
At the same time, he reveals the importance of communicating adequately about suicide, since it can cause an invitation effect if it is done irresponsibly. However, he points out that there is also the Papageno effect, where it is invited to address the issue of suicide, as a preventive effect and to reduce the number of deaths.
"We work on the bond, the feeling of belonging, we will be doing universal prevention of suicide. It is not only a public health problem, it is a social problem. We are all agents of prevention in suicide", bets Calixto Herrera
In this sense, "the feeling of disconnection, the lack of meaning in life. There are boys and girls who already tell you I don't know what I'm here for". Meanwhile, "a toxic happiness that forces you to be happy is supported and if you are not happy according to the canons that are being sold to you, then you are a failure"
"This lonely crowd that is being promoted has to pay a toll in the form of an emotional distress bill, of suicidal behaviors".
