Changing Figure Instead of Frightening Figure

When we look up in November, we rarely see the sun. We look up at the sky through bare treetops. The branches of the trees reach naked and bony into the distance. The leaves, which only a short time ago were still moving colorfully, lie on the ground. The leaves cover the earth like a carpet – rustling and slippery. The power of the trees withdraws into their innermost core. The trees have shed their leaves in order to survive the winter. Goethe described what has taken place in nature once again during these weeks in the following words: «Death is an artifice of nature in order to have plenty of life.» For Stefan Grosse, this statement is exactly what religious education should teach students at Waldorf schools when it comes to death and dying. Grosse himself worked for decades as a class and religious education teacher at the Waldorf School in Esslingen. He is also a member of the board of the Association of Waldorf Schools. Grosse says: «Children and young people should not encounter death as a frightening figure. Rather, they should understand it as a part of life that follows its very own laws. Just like many other phenomena, it is justified, even necessary.»

How to talk about death?

When Grosse wanted to discuss the topics of death and dying with middle and high school students, he liked to do so with the help of hypothetical questions. «What if death didn't exist?» Or: «What if the ability to forget didn't exist? What if we humans could not forget?» In Grosse's professional practice, such questions would have led the students to their own realization that death and also forgetting are the prerequisites for something new to emerge in the world. Another way to approach the topic with students is to deal with natural phenomena, images and stories that reveal the nature of death. When it comes to natural phenomena, Grosse mentions butterflies, for example. They have to leave their life as a caterpillar behind in order to fly through the air as a butterfly. «The butterflies show us that death and dying do not imply anything final, but rather initiate change. Death and dying herald a process of transformation, a change. The butterflies make this clear,” says the former religions teacher. With this special characteristic, they always point a finger, or rather a wing, in the direction of Christianity as a whole. Grosse says: «The whole of Christianity makes no sense without death. Christ's journey from Good Friday to Easter Sunday is the most powerful event of transformation that we can grasp.» One fairy tale that Grosse liked to work with when it came to demonstrating the connection between life and death was The Grimm Brothers' The Grim Reaper. In it, the 13th son of a poor man had become the most famous doctor in the world thanks to a sponsorship from the Grim Reaper. However, after he had twice disobeyed his godfather's command not to bring about the recovery of a seriously ill person against his will, he was led into an underground cave by the godfather. In the cave, the young doctor saw «thousands and thousands of lights burning in immense rows, some large, some half-size, some small. Every moment some went out and others were rekindled, so that the flames seemed to be constantly changing. 'You see,' said Death, 'these are the lights of human life'». As a consequence of having deceived Father Death and snatched two people from his possession, the doctor's life-light also went out in the cave, he «sank to the ground and was now himself in the hands of Death». With this twist, the Grimm fairy tale not only sheds light on the question of death in general, but also on the question of suicide. According to Grosse, this would have been a recurring theme among adolescents around the ninth grade. «With his decisions, the young doctor disregarded the laws of death, deliberately deceived the godfather and paid for it with his life. The cycle of life and death is too majestic for us humans to intervene. I wanted to make the students aware of this at this point,» explains Grosse, who always wanted to convey another message to the young people along with this one. «Every single person on earth is here because they have a very individual task in life. Dealing with this task, coming to terms with it, growing with it – each individual is responsible for this. Knowing this or having a strong sense of it can be life-deciding in an existential crisis,» Grosse is convinced. People often experience a new impulse to seek out and take on this task through a so-called near-death experience. This particular phenomenon also takes up a lot of space, especially in ninth grade. Grosse has found that dealing with it and the descriptions of those affected have given his students confidence.

Stories of the afterlife

A story by Georg Dreißig, a pastor from the Christian Community, tells what can come from dealing with one's own life's work. Grosse also liked to tell this story in his religion lessons in the lower school. In Grandfather's Last Story, Dreißig, who is the author of numerous books, describes dying as a transition into a beautiful garden behind a hedge of wild roses. The garden belongs to a young man – with golden hair, shining eyes and a wreath of flowers on his head – who invites people there because he loves company. If you enter the garden and don't have to wait outside the gate like the grandson in the story and can only look over, the young man leads you to a special flowerbed where very special flowers grow – all those that have grown from the seeds that the individual people have sown. People must continue to tend this bed. Sometimes, however, they send a single flower or even a small bouquet over to the other side of the wild rose hedge. This is another motif that Grosse wanted to pass on to his students: «Deceased people have not disappeared, they accompany those with whom they are connected from another level.»

Space for acceptance

The children and youths are usually very accepting of this content. And even in the specific case of the loss of a parent or sibling, which Grosse has accompanied several times as a class teacher, the young bereaved often seemed less lost to him than the adults. «I believe this is because children are far more aware of the world than adults and can accept what is happening around them as God-given,» Grosse suspects. Nevertheless, the death of a parent, sibling or other close relative always represents a profound turning point in the lives of the surviving family – whether child or adult. And the perspective on death and dying that religious education provides is not an all-encompassing consolation. «Sadness, pain, despair and helplessness are just as justified and must be given space,» says Grosse. He also advocates not leaving children out at a certain point in the dying or farewell process, but considers a continuum to be important. «Wherever there is a gap in our experience, we fill it with assumptions or ideas that we don't know how to handle. What is concrete and tangible, however, we can learn to deal with. What remains in the fog, on the other hand, can overwhelm us,» explains Grosse, who is happy and grateful that this major topic is not only part of religious education. “In the form of natural events, pictures, fairy tales and stories, death and dying resonate throughout childhood and school, and that's a good thing,” he says.