Children and Adolescents on Hemodialysis and Transplantation Programs

Abstract

I try not to sound like Woody Allen when I say this, because while the point is made more tolerable by humor, we tend to forget the pain of it also. The thesis is that we forget the universal fact of death, we who are pledged to treat illness; we forget and repress the pain of death and the psychological demands that death makes upon us as an inevitable fact of our lives. We tend to do this more with children and adolescents than with adults, because a child’s death strikes us as untimely and cruel, a life cut short, an event worse than tragic because children and adolescents are innocent and we, as adults, partake of their spotlessness and assumed longevity. In treating children and adolescents, therefore, we must attend not only to their growth, habilitation, and promise in life, but also to our capacities to remember and tolerate untimely death, loss, or grief.