American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning

University of Georgia Press

Winner, Georgia Author of the Year Award, 2015

 "Sweeney writes the perfect story for our time, in the best possible way."
—Paste Magazine

“From cooling boards to cremationists, obituarists to embalmers, Kate Sweeney’s American Afterlife holds a mirror up to human mortality and mortuary praxis and gives us a reading of the vital signs. Her book braces and emboldens our eschatological nerve—a reliable witness and well-wrought litany to last things and final details.”
—Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

“At a brisk pace, but with frequent stops to relish the magnificent oddities of the terrain, Kate Sweeney guides readers down the lanes and boulevards of the American way of death. As we look into the grave, she looks at us, with an unflinching gaze that would be the envy of Jessica Mitford. Revelatory and—dare I say it?—terrifically entertaining.”
—Peter Trachtenberg, author of Another Insane Devotion

“American Afterlife is an insightful, warm, and lively tour of how we say good-bye. Kate 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 Invisible Sisters and The Magnetic Girl

Someone dies. What happens next?

A family inters its matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the Atlantic. Another holds a memorial weenie roast at a green burial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, “You can make mummies with it!” while a contemporary leading burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. 150 years ago, a grieving mother might tend a garden at her daughter’s grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected at the spot her daughter was killed. Someone dies. What happens next depends both upon our personal stories and where those stories fall in a larger tale—that of death in America.

At once strange and familiar, and by turns odd, poignant, and funny, American Afterlife brings fresh insight to the oldest of concerns.

Kate’s writing has also appeared in Oxford-American Magazine, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Magazine, Utne Reader, and New South Journal, among other places.