Education for death and dying for a full life: Learning to die to learn to live

Abstract

Death is an event that comes to us, by natural order or not, unfailingly at the end of our life. This may sound like a truism, but it is the only certainty we really have. Not all cultures confront, officiate, commemorate or psychosocially represent death in the same way and, consequently, neither all people go through the same grief, nor do they have the same attitudes, thoughts and feelings towards the matter. In our society, death is a taboo subject and constitutes one of the most significant and important sources of anguish. This work presents a study carried out on a sample of people of legal age (n = 200), distributed over five age ranges, to try to determine the life stage, if any, in which one goes from fearing death to accept it. Do we learn to die in the last moments of life or, perhaps, not even then? In this sense, a self-elaborated questionnaire has been used, the items of which are related to the type of thoughts towards death, the qualms about talking about it, the fear to the loved ones death, of dying alone, of loss, to the sudden death, the anxiety about the subject, etc. Finally, a mention is made on the education for death as a tool to assume and accept it, with the aim of leading a full life and full psychosocial well-being.