American Afterlife Quotes

“You can only understand how someone else needs to handle death in the given, specific moment. There are few hard and fast rules. I understand both my father and my friend. Or rather, I understand neither and so allow both the dispensation the ignorant should grant the wise.”
― Kate Sweeney, American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning

“...the sum total of all this [social media] content doesn't quite tell a story. A story has structure, something a writer provides. A writer decides what to focus on and where to cut. Where the story begins, where it picks up momentum. And where it ends.”
― Kate Sweeney, American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning

“Today, there are no prescribed rules for mourning because it takes place outside the rest of American life, and awkward encounters like the one Mary Wilde had at the florist ' s are a natural result of that. And maybe special classifications like "complicated grief" can have the effect of safely categorizing away people to whom horrific things happen, reassuring everyone else that catastrophe is not part of the regular course of human life. Not here, in twenty-first - century America.”
― Kate sweeney, American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning

“It’s not just the permanence of the finished product, but the discomfort inherent in the process that draws people in mourning to translate an emotional throbbing into a physical one and emerge intact on the other side with a beautiful scar.”
― Kate Sweeney, American Afterlife: Encounters in the Customs of Mourning