| clinical thanatology | The clinical practice of counseling people who are dying on the basis of knowledge of reactions to dying.
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| death education | Programs designed to inform people realistically about death and dying, the purpose of which is to reduce the terror connected with and avoidance of the topic.
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| euthanasia | Ending the life of a person with a painful terminal illness for the purpose of terminating the individual’s suffering.
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| grief | A response to bereavement involving a feeling of hollowness and sometimes marked by preoccupation with the dead person, expressions of hostility toward others, and guilt over death; may also involve restlessness, inability to concentrate, and other adverse psychological and physical symptoms.
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| home care | Care for dying patients in the home; the choice of care for the majority of terminally ill patients, though sometimes problematic for family members.
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| hospice | Institution for dying patients that encourages personalized, warm, palliative care.
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| hospice care | An alternative to hospital and home care, designed to provide warm, personal comfort for terminally ill patients; may be residential or home based.
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| infant mortality rate | The number of infant deaths per thousand infants.
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| living will | A will prepared by a person with a terminal illness requesting that extraordinary life-sustaining procedures not be used in the event that the ability to make this decision is lost.
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| palliative care | Care designed to make the patient comfortable, but not to cure or improve the patient’s underlying disease; often part of terminal care.
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| premature death | Death that occurs before the projected age of 75.
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| stages of dying | A theory developed by Kübler-Ross that maintains that people go through five temporal stages in adjusting to the prospect of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance; believed to characterize some but not all dying people.
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| sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) | A common cause of death among infants, in which an infant simply stops breathing.
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| symbolic immortality | The sense that one is leaving a lasting impact on the world, as through one’s children or one’s work, or that one is joining the afterlife and becoming one with God.
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| terminal care | Medical care of the terminally ill.
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| thanatologists | Those who study death and dying.
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2003 McGraw-Hill Higher Education