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 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 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 sometimes even funny.
KATE SWEENEY is an Atlanta-based writer and public radio storyteller and producer. Sweeney’s radio stories air regularly on Atlanta’s NPR station, and she has won a number of Edward R. Murrow awards and Associated Press awards for her work. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Utne Reader, Atlanta Magazine, New South, and elsewhere.
KATE SWEENEY is an Atlanta-based writer and public radio storyteller and producer. Sweeney’s radio stories air regularly on Atlanta’s NPR station, and she has won a number of Edward R. Murrow awards and Associated Press awards for her work. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Utne Reader, Atlanta Magazine, New South, and elsewhere.
Table of Contents
Preface xiii
Chapter 1 American Ways of Death 1
Chapter 2 Gone, but Not Forgotten 9
Dismal Trade: Sarah Peacock, Memorial Tattoo Artist Under the Skin 29
Chapter 3 The Cemetery's Cemetery 37
Dismal Trade: Kay Powell, Obituary Writer The Doyenne Speaks 57
Chapter 4 The Last Great Obit Writers' Conference 67
Chapter 5 Give Me That Old-Time Green Burial 93
Dismal Trade: Oana Hogrefe, Memorial Photographer Memory Maker 107
Chapter 6 The House Where Death Lives 117
Dismal Trade: Lenette Hall, Owner, The Urngarden The Business at the Back of the Closet 143
Chapter 7 With the Fishes 151
Dismal Trade: Anne Gordon, Funeral Chaplain Funerals Are Fun 175
