One of the many things on my ‘to
do’ list is to write an article, based on this title, on loss and death anxiety
relating to people with learning difficulties.
As this is also ‘Dying Matters’ awareness week www.dyingmatters.org, I wanted to share some stories that I have used to explore
these themes in Dramatherapy groups.
I have found that within
organisations for people with learning difficulties, staff try and prepare individuals
for some changes in their lives, such as staffing, going on a trip or new
activities. However the same does not
seem true of death – a very permanent change!
In our society, we rarely speak openly about death - perhaps this is to protect us from our own feelings. I have worked with people where death and other aspects of loss have evoked strong feelings of confusion and anxiety, perhaps even anxiety around their own death, and sometimes it has seemed as if their other anxieties may be linked to this. I think we have to work towards facilitating an individual understanding of death, looking carefully at our collective discourse and speaking more openly about our own feelings and uncertainties. We can rely upon the time-honoured techniques of storytelling and ritual to help us explore and experience our sense of loss in comparative safety.
A personal vignette
When I was three years old, my
best friend at nursery school died from complications resulting from her having a hole in her heart. I still have vivid memories of her mother
coming into school, sitting on a chair as we sat on the floor cross-legged in a
circle around her. She told us the story
of how the angels had come down while her child was on the operating table and
carried her away. They had taken her and
now she was free from pain.
I remember feeling sad and at
the same time comforted by these words. I
went away with these images bubbling around in my three year old mind and
decided that I wanted to become an angel and take away people’s pain. I understood you had to die to become and
angel and I somehow knew that if I lay in the road, this is what would happen
to me. My memory of being dragged away
from the middle of the road is less clear, but I think that this was my one and
only attempt in pursuit of this idea.
How could that grieving mother
have known the consequences of her words to my three year old mind? Was this story intended to help us to
understand what had happened or was it an explanation that she felt able to
pass on to children? Was she protecting us from the sadness of the situation or
protecting herself from our expression of grief?
The Stories
This is a list of some of the stories I have used in Dramatherapy sessions.
Please click on the links to
read the stories.
Just Enough
How Night came into being
The Day the sea went out and
never came back
https://www.scribd.com/document/93912354/The-Day-the-Sea-Went-Out-and-Never-Came-Back
https://www.scribd.com/document/93912354/The-Day-the-Sea-Went-Out-and-Never-Came-Back
The Raven and the Whale
From ‘Songs of Enchantment’ By
Ben Okri
The Woodcutter
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