deceased parent in the casket at the funeral or wake, the child may still ask when he or she is going to come home. In the second stage, the children from ages five to nine, they begin to understand the physical existence of death, yet take it to an extreme and personify death and tend to dismiss the fact that it is a potentiality. In Nagy's final stage, which occurs around the ages of ten or eleven, the children begin to recognize the attributes of death (irreversible, biological, and universal), and that death is possible for everyone including himself or herself. They became much more aware of social connections and other matters implied by death. The only reproach to Nagy's study was that it was conducted in the late 1940's in the country of Hungry, which was still attempting to revive from World War II. The subjects for her experiments most likely had all lost someone close to them and had witnessed the war--bombs, blood, and death--and may also explain why they had a partiality to personifying death. This phenomenon may also support the idea that the beliefs of the culture and experiences form the children's concepts of death. Another investigator of children's understanding of death was S. Anthony, who too had three stages of children's perceptions of death. She...
