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: