Review: 'This Party's Dead: Grief, Joy and Spilled Rum at the World's Death Festivals' by Erica Buist
Pub. Date: 10/08/2021
Publisher: Unbound
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.
Death is both the most unavoidable part of being alive and the thing we try to avoid most. I here use 'we' as a general us, because I personally cannot wait for the sweet release of death. As some of you may know, part of my research has to do with the history of emotions, with how humans express, conceptualise, hide, write about, place their emotions. One thing that became clear the moment I began engaging with the field is that our emotions are, in many ways, socially and culturally conditioned. While an argument can be made for certain universal emotions, how we express these, and when, depends on our time and place. Growing up in Europe, I have been taught certain ways of expressing how I feel and these ways in return also shape how my emotions emerge. I have unfortunately lost a number of loved family members over the years and each time I experience not just the fresh grief, but also the old one, anew. My grief is mostly a quiet thing, although, thankfully, my family leavens its weight with humour. Thinking about this while reading Erica Buist's This Party's Dead, I found her openness about her own emotions, her struggle to know what she can or is allowed to express, and her desire to understand the absence of the fear of death in others, very touching.
Erica Buist has lost her (soon to be) father-in-law, but can a not even really yet daughter-in-law fall apart over that loss? Unsure, Erica instead falls apart generally, developing a sense of agoraphobia and intense anxiety around her loved ones' wellbeing. That is her life, until she stumbles across a death festival online and discovers that not every country or culture is quite as terrified of death as England. So Erica sets off to visit these festivals, from Mexico's Día de los Muertos to the Gai Jatra festival in Nepal, the Ognissanti in Sicily and Famadihana in Madagascar, the delight that is New Orleans and Cheng Meng in Thailand, the Obon festival in Japan, and Indonesia's Tana Toraja. Alongside these travels, which span years, Buist also explores the movement of transhumanists, which think they should never die, explores the rising cult of Santa Muerte, talks to experts in various death-related fields, and touches on personal, human stories about loss and death. I liked getting to hear about all these different festivals and how they worked. What I really appreciated here is how much space on the page Buist gives her various guides, making sure that these festivals are not presented to us only through her own point of view. Seeing how Buist deals with her own grief but also her own unconscious biases is really intriguing, but I also loved the care with which the guides explain their own thoughts and culture. The book really shines there.
Erica Buist is a journalist and from her writing in This Party's Dead you can really tell that she has experience weaving together fact-based information with personal insights for a broad audience. Whether you're intrigued by death tourism, are curious about how other countries celebrate or mourn their dead, or if you've recently lost someone and are unsure how to cope, this book is addressed to you. There is a real skill in that and Buist's writing is incredibly open, personable, and approachable. She is very honest about her own spiralling thoughts or her own almost-disgust at the mere idea of corpses and traces this back pretty clearly to her own culture and upbringing. She is also very funny, which means that despite the topic of the book and the many discussions of death, bodily fluids, corpses, ghosts, and grief, there are plenty of moments where I did have to laugh. I also really appreciated that Buist doesn't present her traveling as a kind of 'Eat, Pray, Love'-esque trip of self-discovery, where everything that is not Europe becomes a place of healing for Europeans who never have to really think about themselves. Buist is skeptical and unsure and doesn't hide the moments where she makes mistakes or is unsure. I also liked the other research she brings into the book and how the whole becomes a real meditation on grief and death without providing a template of "this is what you should do". I'm going to keep my eye out for more writing by Buist!
I give this book...
4 Universes!
This Party's Dead is an very well-written insight into the turmoil of death and grief and of finding a way into celebration and joy. It is also an excellent reminder that the world is made up of all kinds of places, cultures, and people and how much value there is in our diverse way of thinking about life and death.
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