1st Edition
Death, Grief and Loss in the Context of COVID-19
This book provides detailed analysis of the manifold ways in which COVID-19 has influenced death, dying and bereavement.
Through three parts: Reconsidering Death and Grief in Covid-19; Institutional Care and Covid-19; and the Impact of COVID-19 in Context, the book explores COVID-19 as a reminder of our own and our communities’ fragile existence, but also the driving force for discovering new ways of meaning-making, performing rites and rituals, and conceptualising death, grief and life. Contributors include scholars, researchers, policymakers and practitioners, accumulating in a multi-disciplinary, diverse and international set of ideas and perspectives that will help the reader examine closely how Covid-19 has invaded social life and (re)shaped trauma and loss.
It will be of interest to all scholars and students of death studies, biomedicine, and end of life care as well as those working in sociology, social work, medicine, social policy, cultural studies, anthropology, psychology, counselling and nursing more broadly.
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction: Capturing the beginning of a long journey of loss, trauma and grief Panagiotis Pentaris
PART 1: Reconsidering Death and Grief in Covid-19
Chapter 1. Familiarity with death
Panagiotis Pentaris and Kate Woodthorpe
Chapter 2: Grief in the COVID-19 pandemic
Kenneth Doka
Chapter 3: Apocalypse now: COVID-19 and the crisis of meaning
Robert Neimeyer, Evgenia Milman and Sherman Lee
Chapter 4: Physically distant but socially connected: Streaming funerals, memorials and ritual design during COVID-19
Stacey Pitsillides and Jayne Wallace
Chapter 5: Social death in 2020: Covid-19, which lives matter and which deaths count?
Jana Králová
PART 2: Institutional Care and Covid-19
Chapter 6: End-of-life decision-making in the context of a pandemic
Natalie Pattison and Lucy Ryan
Chapter 7: NHS Values, Ritual, Religion, and Covid-19 Death
Douglas Davies
Chapter 8: Non-COVID-19 related dying and death during the pandemic
Wai Yee Chee, Samuel Wang, Winnie Teo, Melissa Fong, Andy Lee and Woon Chai Yong
Chapter 9: Covid-19 and care home deaths and harms: A case study from the UK
Alisoun Milne
Chapter 10: Impact of Covid-19 on mental health and associated losses
Manju Shahul-Hameed, John Foster, Gina Finnerty and Panagiotis Pentaris
Chapter 11: Assisted dying and Covid-19
Theo Boer and Kevin Yuill
PART 3: Impact of COVID-19 in Context
Chapter 12: Losing touch? Older people and COVID-19
Renske Claasje Visser
Chapter 13: Between cultural necrophilia and African American activism: life and loss in the age of COVID
Kami Fletcher and Tamara Waraschinski
Chapter 14: The biopolitics and stigma of the HIV and Covid-19 Pandemics
Jason Schaub
Chapter 15: Suicide in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic
Mohammed Mamun and Jannatul Mawa Misti
Chapter 16: Death and dying during the COVD-19 pandemic: The Indian context
Apurva Kumar Pandya and Khyati Tripathi
Biography
Panagiotis Pentaris is an Associate Professor of Social Work and Thanatology in the School of Human Sciences at the University of Greenwich, London, England, UK, where he is also a member of the Institute for Lifecourse Development, an internationally recognised Institute focusing on interdisciplinary research across the lifespan. Pentaris is a council member for the Association for the Study of Death and Society, and over the last ten years he has researched and published on death, dying, bereavement, culture and religion, social work, social policy and LGBTQIA+ issues.
