The Unknown Sea

Navigating Death, Dying, and Bereavement

Patricia L. Antoine

• Publisher: Chemeketa Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781955499323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Unknown Sea: Navigating Death, Dying, and Bereavement provides a compact, comprehensive text for studying social attitudes, cultural perspectives, and social-institutional factors associated with death and dying. It explores aspects of end-of-life issues, bereavement, and the afterlife from a teaching perspective, engaging gerontology students at any level of study. This textbook dives deep into the global diversity of grief experiences, something most textbooks neglect. Instead of focusing primarily on the thanatology of a white, middle-class experience, The Unknown Sea centers the many diverse cultural, ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic perspectives that shape the meaning of death across the world.

Social Science and Sociology instructors teaching end-of-life and grief subjects often struggle to find a textbook that effectively fits their course due to most books being either too expensive, too large, written for upper-division courses, or poorly designed. The Unknown Sea fills this gap in the published materials currently available, particularly for instructors of introductory or lower-division courses. Students in these courses deserve access to high-quality instructional materials that serve the needs of their instructors’ course design and are affordable.

The Unknown Sea contains the following features:

• Eleven chapters on the major areas covered in death and dying courses
• Expansive real-world examples centering diverse experiences with death and dying
• Macro and micro analysis of topic and core concepts
• A variety of call-out boxes and sidebars to enhance understanding of difficult or specific topics
• Full-color images and original data visualizations
• Chapter discussion questions, suggested activities, and further reading
• A glossary and index of key terms
• A comprehensive bibliography intended to support assertions in the text and provide an additional reading list

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Understanding Death, Dying, and Bereavement
• Chapter 2. Learning About Death
• Chapter 3. Death and the U.S. Experience
• Chapter 4. Cultural and Religious Perspectives on Death
• Chapter 5. Navigating Life-Threatening Disease
• Chapter 6. End-of-Life Treatment Decisions
• Chapter 7. The Dying Process
• Chapter 8. Complexities of the U.S. Health Care Model
• Chapter 9. Violent and Traumatic Death
• Chapter 10. Government, Economics, and the Business of Death
• Chapter 11. Bereavement, Grief, and Mourning
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• References
• Image Credits
• Index