What if we responded to death… by throwing a party?
By the time Erica Buist’s father-in-law Chris
was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been
dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even
feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevitable,
uncomfortable truth: everybody dies.
While her husband maintained a semblance of grace and poise, Erica found herself consumed by her grief, descending into a bout of pyjama-clad agoraphobia, stalking friends online to ascertain whether
any of them had also dropped dead without warning, unable to extract herself
from the spiral of death anxiety… until one day she decided to reclaim control.
With Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities as a
starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death
festivals around the world — one for every day they didn’t find Chris. From
Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and finally Indonesia —
with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one
— Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected
questions around death anxiety.
This Party’s Dead
is the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with
mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they’re going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from
the topic of death — and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down
through the generations, death suddenly doesn’t seem so scary after all.
