{"product_id":"american-afterlife","title":"American Afterlife","description":"\u003cp\u003eSomeone dies. What happens next? \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eOne 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWhat 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eAmerican Afterlife\u003c\/i\u003e 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.","brand":"University of Georgia Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50013594124538,"sku":"9780820346007","price":30.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0840\/1253\/1962\/files\/imageloader_6f7f02f8-dfee-4b89-b8b1-024c7cb7d1dc.jpg?v=1786133762","url":"https:\/\/mindsourcebooks.com\/products\/american-afterlife","provider":"Mind Source Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}