ANNIE HECKMAN

In preparing for my residency I pulled together several books, choosing some more consciously than others. Packing the suitcase forced me to narrow my selection, and the most important titles stood out from the rest and made their way to Budapest with me.

Death: Current Perspectives is a hefty anthology edited by John B. Williamson and Edwin S. Shneidman. I was fortunate to stumble across it when Elise Goldstein and I were doing some initial digging for Hungarian research on death and found the study by Maria Nagy, “The Child’s Theories Concerning Death,” included in this collection of works on thanatology.

Nagy’s study appears in a section titled “Children and Death.” Her approach to treating children as the creators of theories about death has continued to interest me over several readings, and I keep returning to the words of the children she interviewed in 1948 Budapest. An example of words from an eight-year-old child:

“When death goes away it leaves footprints behind. When the footprints disappeared it came back and cut down more people. And when they wanted to catch it, it disappeared.”

Nagy’s study first appeared in the Volume 73 of the Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1948.