Touching Live To Love campaign from North Rhine-Westphalia

"I would like to report on a project week at my school and express my thanks to Gianna Wabner. At the school where I teach, we had a project week on the topic of "Death and Grief". There were many wonderful moments with my 9-year-old pupils. We thought about what grief feels like, where grief can be in the body and what can help us when we are sad. We created memory boxes for things we would like to keep, and when we visited a cemetery, the children sang "Happy Birthday" for Gertrud at a grave because they saw that it was her birthday that week. A mortician told us about his everyday life and gave the children the opportunity to artistically design a coffin and an urn. He explained to us that he would use these for a social funeral, which takes place when someone has no relatives.

A particularly nice moment for me was when a child said how much he enjoyed this project week. He found his stepfather dead in bed before he started school three years ago, his mother is seriously ill and he also recently found her unconscious. My feeling is that this is the first time he has had the opportunity to deal with this at all and to understand and come to terms with some of his experiences.