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.

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.

Introduction: Capturing the beginning of a long journey of loss, trauma and grief . PART 1: Reconsidering Death and Grief in Covid-19. 1. Familiarity with death. 2. Grief in the COVID-19 pandemic. 3. Apocalypse now: COVID-19 and the crisis of meaning. 4. Physically distant but socially connected: Streaming funerals, memorials and ritual design during COVID-19. 5. Social death in 2020: Covid-19, which lives matter and which deaths count? PART 2: Institutional Care and Covid-19. 6. End-of-life decision-making in the context of a pandemic. 7. NHS values, ritual, religion, and COVID-19 death. 8. Non-COVID-19 related dying and death during the pandemic. 9. Covid-19 and care home deaths and harms: A case study from the UK. 10. Impact of Covid-19 on mental health and associated losses. 11. Assisted dying and Covid-19. PART 3: Impact of COVID-19 in Context. 12. Losing touch? Older people and COVID-19. 13. Between cultural necrophilia and African American activism: life and loss in the age of COVID. 14. The biopolitics and stigma of the HIV and Covid-19 Pandemics. 15. Suicide in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. 16. Death and dying during the COVD-19 pandemic: The Indian context.