The Grief Artist

For fans of Six Feet Under and Caitlin Doughty's From Here to Eternity comes a meditation on grief, rituals and art by award-winning author Traci Brimhall

The Grief Artist is a collection of essays that reflects on death rituals and the absence thereof in contemporary American culture. Brimhall examines the wreaths and tableaux of Victorian mourners, death photography and mourning fashions. She rents a haunted house to try and talk to the dead and a museum of haunted objects in the effort to experience something spiritual and uncanny, made blankets for hospice patients, visited ghost towns and interviewed believers of the paranormal all while trying to understand her own grief. During her travels and investigations she came to understand how deeply individualized mourning and grief was to people across the United States. But through lyrical and thoughtful observations also asks the question how do we grieve communally? Can we? Is it possible to build a more accessible set of cultural death rituals? Through cultural analysis and observation, historical research and personal story, Brimhall contemplates how we grieve and endure.