Give sorrow words: working with a dying child

This is a reissued edition of the book that Dorothy Judd wrote in the 1980s, which was first published in 1989. It was a seminal work then and still richly deserves to be accessible to new generations of those working with ill or dying children. As is stated in the current foreword to the book, ‘our need to prepare for, to understand, to experience death remains fundamental’. This book is written in a fluent way, with many quotations from literature that seem so apposite, reminding us that there is nothing new in human suffering, although the particular way it is experienced may be modern.

The heart of the book is Judd's account of her therapeutic meetings with 7-year-old Robert over the period of a few months following a bone marrow transplant up to his death. Her bravery in both doing this difficult work and in writing about it makes me proud to be a colleague, a fellow child and adolescent psychotherapist. Her descriptions of his physical suffering are excruciating and the way in which she introduces us to his, his family's and her pain and suffering is remarkable. She suggests (p. xvii) that the book may help us to think ‘about that which perhaps is not unthinkable’ while at the same time recognising that the death of a child is ‘an outrage’.

This is the third edition, with the second having been published in 1995. As far as I can see, little has been added to the main body of the text, while it is clear from the works of others cited that a considerable number of new studies that took place in the early 1990s were added for the second edition. What brings this edition up to date is a very substantial introduction by Claudia de Campos, who works in a hospital setting. She brings in the ‘outside world’ of policy documents as well as advances in the field since the book was first written. Her scholarly introduction brings in statements from leading medical staff in the field. These are well woven into her narrative and show, in many excerpts, great honesty and human