When his troubled mother is killed in a car accident, Jonah Swain finds himself confronting the ghosts in his family's complex past, images of depression and alcoholism which have scattered his family and threatened to close him off to love and happiness. As he embarks on a journey through an intricate landscape of memories and emotions, Jonah comes to realize he must finally face a vision of lost innocence that has disturbed him since childhood, and rise above a tangled past of heartbreak and estrangement. At times poetic and raw, filled with both anger and sadness, After the Death of the Ice Cream Man is a somber but ultimately transcendent meditation on death, mourning, and the rediscovery of love.