Grief in Children: A Handbook for Adults. By Atle Dyregrov. London:  Jessica Kingsley Being and Not Being: Clinical Applications of the Death Instinct. By Otto Weininger. Connecticut:  International Universities Press.

Children and Death are powerful subjects. There are the powerful images of accidents and atrocities — Dunblane, Bosnia, Rwanda — but also the distress of the ‘ordinary’ bereavements — the child whose parent dies from illness or an accident, the children whose classmate dies, the children whose sibling dies. How do we as adults and professionals do what we can to help in these situations? Both these books are very clear that unless we have individually come to terms with death, our own mortality, and the past or future deaths of our parents and our children, we cannot be of much help at all.

Atle Dyregrov is a Norwegian psychologist who has worked with bereaved and dying children; and this is a useful small book which could be helpful to parents, relatives, teachers and primary-care workers. The book is full of practical suggestions and urges that children be talked to in a straightforward, direct way. Dyregrov shows how euphemisms can be confusing and damaging: the finality and permanence of death should not be avoided by ideas such as sleep, a long journey, the after-life. He is very keen not to pathologise the bereaved or dying, and to emphasise that death is a part of the life-cycle, even when it is untimely death. It is society that wants to avoid recognition of death, because it feels unbearable to have to face it.