Next Monday, Esther Serra Giménez begins the workshop ‘Let’s talk about death’, the final stop on the master’s degree in palliative care that this nurse, who is also one of the Sonrisa Médica clowns in Ibiza, has completed.
‘To be more aware of life, let’s talk about death’. That is the title of the workshop that Esther Serra, a nurse from the Pitiusa Health Department who is finishing a master’s degree in palliative care and who is also a member of the Sonrisa Médica clown team, will be giving next week. There will be four sessions (2, 6, 9 and 13 August), from 10am to 12pm, at the Can Misses health centre. It is open to all users of this clinic. “Sign up!” encourages the nurse, saying that all they have to do is send a whatsapp message to 679474658.
Where has this workshop to talk about death come from?
This workshop comes from a personal and professional motivation and is framed in the context of my master’s degree final project in palliative care that I have completed in Barcelona. It is an educational intervention in a primary care centre. It was between Vila and Can Misses, but as they had just opened new facilities and they were lively and eager, very fresh, so I chose Can Misses. I proposed it to them and they answered me very enthusiastically.
Who can sign up?
Let’s see, it’s a double intervention. I already did a session aimed at professionals from the centre, but then I want to focus on the greater population because we professionals have our own training channels, but right now with the pressure of care that there is I didn’t want to overload them. Also, I think things work better if you empower the population. With these two sides, health and population, it will be more complete and everything will make more sense. It will be like a pilot study that, if it works, the idea is to export it to the other health centres. I would love to. This workshop is aimed at anyone of legal age, from 16 years old onwards, and who is registered at the Can Misses health centre.
Do they have to be people who have been through or are going through a delicate situation due to a death?
No, not at all. Anyone who hasn’t yet gone through a death-related experience will eventually go through it. Having a relationship with death is something that none of us can escape. In the course of our lives we will experience it on several occasions. Our own death, of course, but we will also have losses. It is inevitable. It seems to be something that always happens to others, but this is precisely why I think it is important that we talk about it.
Do we talk about death too little?
Very little. And, paradoxically, it is also rarely talked about in the health field. Or it is talked about in a way that compromises little. As if in the third person, in the distance… We talk little about our own death. It is true that this year, precisely, at a global level, there has been a lot of talk, but at a distance. And there are times when it is trivialised or talked about from the point of view of morbidity. And that is also evasive. You are not talking about it from your own involvement, a reflection. This is very difficult. There is an initiative that I started with other colleagues a week ago, death cafés, online. It’s a global movement that emerged years ago in England and they are gatherings with open conversations about death. We wanted to make them specifically for health workers, precisely because of the paradox that we live with it continuously in a very direct way and at the same time it is very taboo among us.
Why is it so taboo?
Fundamentally because it is scary. And in our culture we have a tendency to avoid that which frightens us. We can avoid it temporarily, but at some point we will face it and it causes a lot of suffering without previous reflection. It confronts us with our vulnerability and generates discomfort.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.