This Party’s Dead

Erica Buist's life changed when her father-in-law Chris died alone. He was found in his bed with a book open on his chest, and by then he had been gone for more than a week. Searching for an explanation, she turned over the rich cheeses in his fridge as a possible cause, and wondered whether a daughter-in-law even counted among the mourners who mattered. The answer she kept returning to was the plain fact that everyone dies.

Her husband carried his loss with composure, but Erica sank into fear. She stayed in her pajamas, avoided leaving the house, and checked her friends' social media for signs that any of them had collapsed without warning. Eventually she resolved to take back some control. Taking Mexico's Day of the Dead as her starting point, she set out to face death directly by visiting seven festivals devoted to the dead, one for each day Chris had gone undiscovered.

Her route runs from Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar and Japan, ending in Indonesia, with a stop in New Orleans, a city where the dead outnumber the living ten to one. Along the way she puts basic and unexpected questions about death anxiety to the people she meets.

This is a memoir of that journey, an attempt to learn how other cultures live with the fear of mortality, get on with ordinary life knowing they will die, and talk about death openly rather than avoiding it. It also considers how that openness, when handed down through the generations, can make death feel less frightening.