American Afterlife : Encounters in the Customs of Mourning

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 neck- lace 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 nd 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 some- times even funny.