The authors of this paper explore the distress that terminally ill children experience when they see the suffering their illness and dying is causing their parents. The authors refer to this experience as special sorrow. The conceptual framework that guides this reflection of the terminally ill child’s experience is the Roy adaptation model. The goal of this paper is to explore the concept of special sorrow as lived, so as to help nurses be with such children and their parents in a way that eases sorrow through effective adaptation and transcendence.
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