Why the World Throws Parties for the Dead

Marcus Smith (0:05)

Encounters with Awe, you're listening to Constant Wonder. I'm Marcus Smith.

You're about to meet a lively, delightful, good-humored, I would say perfectly normal person. And yet throughout her childhood and early adulthood, Erica Buist had high anxiety about death and dying. Abnormally high, I would say, sometimes incapacitating. Even in her late twenties, whenever she saw her partner Dion descending a staircase, she would worry about him falling and breaking his neck. That's no way to live from day to day.

What's more, Erica had never seen the deceased body of a friend or a family member. So how does somebody beset by both fear of dying and fear of the dead end up in a remote part of Indonesia where embalmed bodies are routinely kept right out in plain view of the living, hanging around the house for months or even years? You know you're not in Kansas anymore when you see something like this.

Erica Buist (1:08)

This woman who had been dead for four years, she had brand new clothes and there were people running up to her, putting their phones in her dead face because there's someone on FaceTime who wants to see her.

And I saw this woman going, Oh my God, hi! You know, she was so happy to see her again.

Marcus Smith (1:36)

Erica has given the way she looks at death a complete overhaul, and she thinks maybe you should too.

She's actually amazingly persuasive on the subject not just of coming to terms with our mortality, but of practically celebrating it. Erica Buist is the author of This Party's Dead, Grief, Joy and Spilled Rum at the World's Death Festivals, about to be released in paperback. To gain first-hand experience with these festivals, she needed to get out and about, so she traveled around the world to explore the astonishingly varied ways that people treat their dead.

But first, where did her own abnormally high anxiety about death really begin?

Erica Buist (2:20)

It's apparently very common for children of about five to suddenly declare that they're never going to die. That's apparently something a lot of children do. So I'm guessing it was that, that I suddenly declared that I was never going to die. And my father said so sort of casually, like, yeah, of course you are, everyone does.

And I was quite baffled by that.

Mainly about everyone dying. And then I said, well, you won't die, daddy. And he said, well, of course I will. And then my sister and I just started wailing because that's what children do when you give them, when you give them something with which they have no resource to cope. And so the way he tried to calm us down was by explaining that it wasn't going to happen for years, you know, you're going to be an old lady. And that sort of calmed me down. And then he said, and anyway, at some point after that, the sun will die and then everything will die and nothing will exist and I was just like, the sun will die. I got all this information in about 15 seconds. I remember being so horrified by this. And then I just decided to stop thinking about it. Or at least I only thought about death every few hours after that.

Marcus Smith (3:29)

Well, answer me this if you would. After that traumatic revelation that death is a thing, subsequent weeks, months, years, as a child, you very humorously said that you only thought about death every few hours after that. But really, level with me. Did you suppress it? Did you try to put it in the back of your mind? Did you bracket it off? What did you do with it?

Erica Buist (3:53)

Yeah, I mean, I definitely developed a level of health anxiety that I now realize is not okay.

So, I mean, I also, I studied philosophy at university and I did my dissertation on death. Again, I thought this is very normal. And it turns out it possibly wasn't. It mainly presented for me as death anxiety. Again, we all think we're the average, don't we? So, you know, you sort of say, yeah, you know what it's like when your partner's on the stairs and you think they're going to die and everyone says, what? No, what are you talking about?

Marcus Smith (4:26)

Well, okay, here I sit in the United States and there you are in the UK. And we've got a few things in common. Some people think it's a language, but in terms of the way you were situated, was there any kind of support for your concerns, your anxiety, your worries in the UK.?