American Afterlife
Encounters in the Customs of Mourning
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
An award-winning writer explores the patchwork American cultural history of grieving the departed.
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 where 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 are personally involved with death: obit writers in the desert, an Atlantic funeral voyage, a fourth-generation funeral director―even a midwestern museum that shows us our death-obsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another, revealing a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that's by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny.
"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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. To capture America's relationship to death today, Sweeney offers trivia and history (the term "casket" is an American invention), taking readers from the Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Ill., to Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, Ga., where she recounts the rise of the modern cemetery. She explores the new "green" funeral movement, obituary writing, the funeral urn business, and burial at sea. Readers meet mourners and those in their service: the memorial tattoo artist; the photographer who provides a last memento of newborns taken too soon; a funeral chaplain; and the mother who maintains a roadside memorial to her daughter. In addition, the author discusses larger issues, such as the American obsession with prolonging life at the expense of quality of life, or the remove at which we keep death today. 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. Photos.
