Death education promotes pathways to death reflection in order to deal with grief and death in a conscious way.
What are the possible paths of death education?
Death education pathways are useful for the education of children, adolescents, adults and the elderly in order to deal consciously and without superficiality with the anguish of death and dying, activating the capacity typical of all ages, with their respective peculiarities, to think about finitude and eternity. According to Ines Testoni’s indications in the book The Last Birth, death education activities can be divided into:
- primary prevention, identified in the ancient memento mori, understood as teaching that focuses on the search for meaning, understanding death, attitudes and ways of dealing with finitude from early childhood to senility;
- secondary prevention, which concerns ars moriendi, relating to becoming aware of how one wants to die and how one accompanies those who die;
- tertiary prevention, which is that which makes possible a healthy transformation of grief into mourning, so that it ends and does not fall into pathological dynamics that destine the mourners to the drift of despair.
Death education and the thoughts on eternity of Emanuele Severino
The terms “education, education” are derived from the Latin word “educere”, which we can translate as: “to lead out of”. According to Plato, education leads human beings to the knowledge of truth, drawing them out of their original condition of ignorance. Emanuele Severino points out that at the root of this thought is nihilism: the belief in the nullity of things and the becoming of things. Truth cannot be a coming to light out of nothing, but is a being already from ever and forever present. Education, therefore, is impossible if it is understood as the transformation of ignorance into knowledge.
“Death education is a will to e-ducere that knows the impossibility of all educere, that is, it knows that everything that could be believed to be something “obtained” by it is not its own product, but is the manifestation, in those who are “educated” to death, of a way of thinking and feeling that is itself an eternal.” the words of Emanuele Severino could not be clearer in recognizing the authentic meaning of death education.
Awareness of the impossibility of becoming and the contradiction of all acting, however, does not mean that death education is doomed to illusion and failure. In fact, acting with this awareness is profoundly different from acting unaware of the eternity of the being. Consequently, the language of death education will also be different.
With respect to the discourse on the eternity of the being, the philosophy’s indication that human beings are mortal as long as they believe they are destined to becoming, like all things in the world and, therefore, to nothingness, is dazzling. However, once it is proven that everything is eternal, it will be a matter of finding that everything is eternal. In order to explore these issues in more detail, one is invited to study the thought of Emanuele Severino and, in particular, the volume La morte e la terra.
Our society has removed from its consciousness the ancient necessity of the memento mori, excluding the individual’s possibility of becoming self-aware through reflection on the anguish of death and the pain of dying. But accessing pathways of reflection on what it means to “exist”, knowing that sooner or later one will have to face the pain of bereavement or the anguish of one’s own death, is a necessity in order not to find oneself speechless and unprepared in the face of such events.
These are certainly not paths through which one can eliminate grief and anguish – but why, on the other hand, would it be desirable to eliminate grief and anguish? This, too, is a dutiful question to be asked in the philosophical sphere. Suffice it, at this point in the discussion, to say that it is not the task of meditatio mortis to eliminate pain and anguish, but it is its task to bring to light the truth of pain, just as it is its task to bring to light the true remedy.
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Butō dance as death education
The remedy against the anguish of death has been sought by humanity since the most ancient dances around the fire. Several times I have been confronted with death in the course of my butō dance experiences. I well remember my teacher Atsushi Takenouchi’s first class, during which he proposed that our group dance facing our death. I also remember a performance I dedicated to the alchemical nigredo phase, the second act of The Presage of The Phoenix, during which I danced the putrefaction of matter by bringing to the stage the image of the pulverization into ashes of an old phoenix.
Prior to mourning, death was an aesthetic experience for me, nurtured and cultivated through the expressive forms of artists such as Tatsumi Hijikata, Kazuo Ohno, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramović, from my studies in art history, and from my meditation experiences. The experience of mourning definitely changed my relationship with death and dying, making it closer and more vivid in my skin. In particular, the search for a remedy against the pain and anguish of death and dying had never been a necessity for me.
Dance can activate first-level meditatio mortis experiences, promoting the signification of death and dying through paths suitable for all ages, from early childhood to senility. Awareness about death and dying allows us to deal wisely with the anguish that assails us in the face of our death and the grief that pervades us during a bereavement.
But what dance promotes death education? It will therefore be necessary to define what we mean by “dance”, especially when we witness the impossibility of all becoming and annihilation; that is, when we affirm that everything, even the most negligible, is eternal. But, in order to bring to light the authentic meaning of these words, which might resonate as myth rather than incontrovertible truth, it is necessary to delve into the territory of philosophy.
If every gesture is eternal, different is the spectacle that is shown to the eyes of the dancer. For the dancer who, faced with death, dances in the light of eternity, it is not a matter of inventing new gestures, but of letting the gestures say what they have been saying since they were offered to the truth of being.
