…the death of a child should be considered not as a ‘trauma’ but rather as a ‘tragedy’. People are expected to eventually recover from a trauma but not necessarily from a tragedy, which requires a time of ‘dwelling in sorrow’ and accompaniment.
A medical anthropologist with a post doctoral qualification in paediatric palliative care from McGill University, Mary Ellen Macdonald gave a thought provoking talk on present day thinking around the death of children. Her presentation entitled “An overview of Sociocultural Trends in Thinking about Child Death” described four common socio-cultural scripts…read more