As part of the Ivy Hall Writers Series, Atlanta author and WABE producer Kate Sweeney visited on Thursday, April 3 to discuss her new book, “American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning.” The nonfiction collection focuses on a taboo subject: death. Sweeney began the project in her M.F.A program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, realizing she had an interest in how Americans choose to mourn and memorialize lost loved ones. The completed book was published in March by the University of Georgia Press.
Writing a book about death can be tricky, from finding interview subjects to talking about it socially. When friends and family asked Sweeney what she was working on during the early stages, she said, “It seems to be a book about death.” From cold-calling funeral homes to finding families who were willing to talk about their experiences, she kept pursuing the parts that fascinated her. “I lucked out in a lot of ways. I found people who really wanted to talk,” she said.
The essay collection covers a wide range of experiences, from a conference of avid lovers of obituaries to a day at sea where human ashes — re-formed into coral reef balls — were released into the depths of the ocean. A memorial photographer discusses photographing stillborn infants with their grieving parents, capturing the fleeting instant the family was united. A woman who’s in the urn-selling business discusses the growing demand for a place to permanently house cremains as cremation continues to grow in popularity. Sweeney visits a funeral museum, roadside memorials and a green burial, always touching upon the old and the new of how we treat dead bodies.
One such story is how death has become a booming, expensive business. The Victorian Era created the ornate front room of a home, the “parlor,” which served as the hub of a family’s existence. In the parlor you could conceivably court your significant other, propose to them and then — years later — grieve over their casket. When funeral homes came into existence, they were thus quick to take on the moniker “funeral parlor” to make clients feel more at home. Meanwhile, Americans tried to distance themselves from a room once associated with death, changing the American “parlor” into the American “living room.” We stopped dying and having funerals in our own homes, and chose instead to outsource death to other places. “We became less and less familiar with what death looks like,” said Sweeney. “And what dying looks like.”
On accessing such personal moments, Sweeney recommended gaining the subject’s trust by being an active listener and spending lots of time with them. Her other advice was to announce your scholarship: “Say, ‘I’m a graduate student and this is for my thesis.’ How much harm is that going to do?” Using her thesis as a ticket into taboo experiences, Sweeney was able to delve into some of the unheard stories of death and mourning in “American Afterlife.”