This research examines family and health-care-staff stress in the context of death in health-care pediatric units. The plan of the research will be to provide an overview of the subject and then to present a review of relevant literature, with a view toward identifying major and subsidiary issue fronts relative to this topic.
That a child should predecease his parents is the most wretched of cosmic ironies. The subject has informed a body of popular literature, of which John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud, written in 1949 and taking its title from a sonnet by John Donne, is exemplary:
The impending death of one's child raises many questions on one's mind and heart and soul. It raises all the infinite questions, each answer ending in another question. What is the meaning of life? What are the relations between things: life and death? the individual and the family? the family and society? . . . science and politics and religion? man, men, and God? All these questions came up in one way or another, and Johnny and I talked about them. . . . He wasn't just dying, of course. He was living and dying and being reborn all at the same time each day (Gunther, 1939, p. 155).
By no means are emotional meditations confined to literary narratives. An editor's note to a statistical review of death certifications in Pima County, Ariz., says the following:
There's something very sad about the results of this study, and I refer to more than the deaths of children. Modern medicine has forced the demise of house calls and, by inference of this study, comforting families at the time of children's deaths. Catherine D. DeAngelis, MD (Bowen & Marshall, 1998, p. 852).
The subtext of this note is that pediatric death is more than a medical phenomenon. It takes an emotional and psychological toll on those who love their children as well as on those who care for them, whether personally, professionally, or medically. Aggravating that toll is the fact ...