The Liceo Virgilio in Milan is experiencing profound pain after the New Year’s Eve tragedy in Crans-Montana which involved four of its students. An event that left a mark on the boys and girls and on the entire school community.
We have a class that is broken from a psychological point of view, says principal Roberto Garroni.
Harsh but necessary words, which tell the extent of a collective trauma and the urgency of immediate intervention to prevent this wound from turning into something even more serious over time.
This is why the school has decided to put care at the centre, activating a structured path with specialized psychologists and involving teachers and families. The objective is to build a real support network, capable of accompanying the children in re-elaborating the shock and pain.
“Our focus now is working with kids“, reiterated Garroni, while underlining the need to shed full light on responsibilities and openly supporting the families’ request for justice. But first of all comes the emotional health of the students, which cannot be left to chance or the simple passage of time.
The risk does not only concern those who were present that night, but also those who have lost a friend and are suddenly confronted with the fragility of life. For some, a sense of guilt for having survived may emerge, for others anxiety, insecurity and fear of losing control over what happens. This is why psychologists recommend long-term monitoring: children are at a developmental age, more vulnerable, and it cannot be taken for granted that “it will pass with time”. We need constant attention, personalized paths and an adult community that takes responsibility for truly protecting their emotional future.
The letter
Meanwhile, a touching letter is circulating on the web that a teacher from the same school wrote, addressing all the boys and girls: words that celebrate life, that hold hands in a moment of suffering and that do not close the door to hope.
A writing that opens a real space to talk about both life and death, without rhetoric and without moralism, remaining within a principle of reality in which pain and hope are not excluded, but coexist.
Here it is:
“The tragedy of Crans pushes us to review the hierarchies of our anxieties, our fears, our anger. All the problems that seem insurmountable to us appear reduced in the face of death, in the face of an immovable ‘never again’. The anxiety that often assails you (and that assails us adults too), the anguish for a future that is not yet clear or definable, can perhaps be reduced to size by the thought that it is still possible for us to think about the future, that the very fact that we can look to the future, even if with a little anguish, means that we are alive.
Here, let’s stick to it, stick to life, honor it by giving full meaning to every moment, don’t waste even one of it. Umberto Saba closed in one of his most beautiful poems by saying that in him he always felt the ‘painful love of life’ strong and important; the painful love of life, loving life even if this involves pain, failures, falls, difficulties. And Saba knew many pains, starting from the absence of a father who had abandoned him immediately and a Jewish belonging which saw him as a victim of the racial laws.
It’s not easy to always love life.There are times when it seems to us that the difficulties are insurmountable and the pain unbearable. But if they are there it means that we are there. Love life, also in memory of your peers who are no longer with us and thinking of the terrible difficulties (physical and psychological) of your seriously burned companions.
You obviously have no fault whatsoever for their pain, nor should you feel ‘guilty’ because you are alive and well and they are not.
And it’s normal if perhaps in these days you feel a lot of anger, a lot of frustration when faced with something incomprehensible and completely unfair.
I don’t know how you can channel this anger, I don’t know how you can overcome the confusion.
I only know that you should (we should) wake up every morning knowing that life is, every day, a gift, to be valued and used to the fullest, in relationships with oneself and with others, without wasting time on silly arguments, on resentments that ruin relationships (with parents, with friends), savoring what every moment can give us; even the foggy days in Milan, the heavy mornings at school, the subjects we really don’t like, the teachers we can’t stand, the parents who interfere in your lives, all this is life too.
