Death in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. In this meditative book, Shannon Lee Dawdy embarks on a transformative journey across the nation, talking to funeral directors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, and ordinary people from all walks of life. What she discovers is that, by reinventing death, Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection across generations. American Afterlives is lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife.