In this Book
- American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning
- Book
- 2014
- Published by: University of Georgia Press
summary
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 greenburial 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 deathobsessed 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.
Table of Contents
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- 1. American Ways of Death
- pp. 1-8
- 2. Gone, but Not Forgotten
- pp. 9-28
- 3. The Cemetery’s Cemetery
- pp. 37-56
- 5. Give Me That Old-Time Green Burial
- pp. 93-106
- 6. The House Where Death Lives
- pp. 117-142
- 7. With the Fishes
- pp. 151-174
- 8. Death by the Roadside
- pp. 183-202
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 207-208
- Bibliography
- pp. 215-216
Additional Information
ISBN
9780820346892
Related ISBN(s)
9780820346007
MARC Record
OCLC
870646726
Pages
232
Launched on MUSE
2014-10-25
Language
English
Open Access
No