ABSTRACT
The subject of children with a permanent developmental handicap is discussed in another book in the present series (by Sheila and Martin Hollins). This chapter focuses on the ordinary illnesses that befall every 5–10-year-old and the problems related to the death of a close person. It is not rare to find people who reach their adult life with no experience of losing a close person through death. Of course, they have a clear, definite, intellectual concept of death, but not having been through the direct impact of the loss of a dear one, they are spared the emotional turmoil and many of the anxieties that befall the person who had to cope with the experience of being alive while a dear person died. Those brought up in a religious family will acquire very early the knowledge of death, in the context of heaven or hell taking over someone who lived on earth.
