American Afterlife - Encounters in the Customs of Mourning (Paperback)

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.

General

Imprint:	University of Georgia Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	September 2016
Authors:	Kate Sweeney
Dimensions:	228 x 152 x 15mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	232
ISBN-13:	978-0-8203-5058-5
Categories:	Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Customs & folklore > Customs Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Death & dying > General Promotions
LSN:	0-8203-5058-3
Barcode:	9780820350585

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