My name is Holly Yellow. I can't spell for to ffee! At times I really thought being able to spell would feel like owning the world. Frankly, I have tried practically everything from normal tutors teaching me to crazy methods. It's only now I realise it really does not matter! Why did I think it did? Even when nothing makes any sense life goes on and so does Holly's fantasy misspellings. All the incidents actually happened a " the book is a true account of Holly's individual's experiences growing up. When you're near her you're guaranteed something is going to happen. The book gives a dyslexic humorous insight into the confusion, thinking and coping skills developed by Holly Yellow! As an author I have written this book for my friend Holly who cannot spell. All I can say if you can't spell, Oh Well What The Hell!

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.

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.