Overview

Someone dies. What happens next? One family inters their matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a green-burial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, “You can make mummies with it!” while a leading contemporary burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. A grieving mother, 150 years ago, might spend her days tending a garden at her daughter’s grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected at the spot her daughter was killed. One mother wears a locket containing her daughter’s hair; the other, a necklace containing her ashes. What happens after someone dies depends on our personal stories and on where those stories fall in a larger tale—that of death in America. It’s a powerful tale that we usually keep hidden from our everyday lives until we have to face it. American Afterlife by Kate Sweeney reveals this world through a collective portrait of Americans past and present who find themselves personally involved with death: a klatch of obit writers in the desert, a funeral voyage on the Atlantic, a fourth-generation funeral director—even a midwestern museum that takes us back in time to meet our death-obsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another until something larger is revealed: a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that’s by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny.

Full Product Details

9780820346007

Table of Contents

Reviews

American Afterlife is an insightful, warm, and lively tour of how we say goodbye. Kate Sweeney's quest for the 'why' behind mourning rituals has given us a book in the best tradition of narrative journalism. --Jessica Handler, author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing about Grief and Loss

Respectfully illuminating both the ludicrousness and the significance of mourning and its accompanying memorialization rituals, Sweeney reports the unsavory details alongside the poignancy of grief and sorrow. Written with the grim wit and appreciation of investigative reporter Mary Roach, the author delivers informative history on the murky business of death. A considerate exploration of mourning, just haunting enough to attract those with a penchant for macabre oddities. -- Kirkus Reviews

As radio reporter and producer Sweeney notes in this unsettling, compassionate volume on American mourning customs, death was once a ubiquitous part of American life; the Victorians raised mourning to an art form... Her stories originate mostly in the South, but have universal relevance. Sweeney writes with a deft touch and with empathy for mourners, whose stories she relays with clarity and care. - Publishers Weekly

Author Information

KATE SWEENEY is an Atlanta-based writer and public radio storyteller and producer. Sweeney’s radio stories air regularly on Atlanta’s NPR station, and she has won a number of Edward R. Murrow awards and Associated Press awards for her work. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Utne Reader, Atlanta Magazine, New South, and elsewhere.

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