This Party's Dead (Erica Buist)
OVERVIEW
When Erica’s father-in-law-to-be dies, Erica wonders if she’s allowed to be devastated. The grieving of his direct family members seems permissible, appropriate, but where is “daughter-in-law-to-be” allowed to feature in the bereavement hierarchy? Erica finds it difficult to go back to work, even to leave the house. She knows she is not “coping” well. But at some point, Erica remembers Día de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, from the two years she spent living in Mexico. It prompts her to Google other death festivals. She finds them – in Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan, and Indonesia. Here, the dead are celebrated, worshipped, invited back. Here, mourning is not private, it’s public. The festivals send the message that death is normal, and that no one is alone in life or in grief. Erica is immediately drawn to the idea of visiting these festivals, of trading in her agoraphobia for celebrations of the dead. How can people face their mortal terror so openly, so publicly? Erica’s journey turned into a book: This Party’s Dead: Grief, Joy and Spilled Rum at the World’s Death Festivals.
What I loved most about this book is that the author, Erica Buist, is a true mortal atheist! As such, the festival experiences are filtered through a secular lens, the religious/supernatural content included but sifted out when searching for broader themes that can resonate with a skeptical audience. Three of her insights, especially, resonate with me.
Social vs. physical death
While celebrating Ma’nene in Indonesia, Erica reflects on a conversation she had with palliative care lecturer Laura Green months back. Laura said that people have two deaths: a social death, and a physical death. In places like the UK or the US, social death can happen before physical death. Dying people are often treated as if they’re already dead – friends and family stop visiting, stop calling, disappear well ahead of biological death. Maybe they don’t know what to say. Maybe they want to remember you as you were… when you were more alive. In places like Indonesia, the opposite is true. People don’t disappear from your life even after your life is over. Death festivals remind us that there are places where loved ones carry their dead with them, where the dead are still part of the community and still have a role to play in life. In Indonesia, or Mexico, or Japan, to be dead is not to be forgotten, it is to be remembered – to be celebrated, revered, and cared for.
Grief as love with no place to go
Erica also reflects on the adage that grief is just love with no place to go. What these death festivals do is give the love some place to go. They invite us to wonder how we might have a continuing relationship with our dead (without actually believing the dead are with us in any supernatural sense) – that we can still carry them with us, that death doesn’t need to be the end of a person or a relationship. When the love remains, we can all give it somewhere to go.
Death as something to cure
What about those who want to cure death? What about the transhumanists? I appreciated Erica’s thoughts on the transhumanism movement, which is led and populated by, overwhelmingly, affluent white men. Erica wonders if there’s a reason why only the most privileged members of society would see death as something to be cured. “They have food, water; shelter; the cops aren’t shooting them; no one’s threatening to rape them – death is a problem to the most privileged because ‘this sweet deal has an expiry date’ is the gravest of very few problems.” Erica recognizes this comes from a place of mortal terror, which we all have, but perhaps the more privileged and protected we are, the more we see death as an injustice, an unfairness.
To tie it all together, I would also add that the desire for immortality, to live on somehow, is our most ancestral and most unifying response to death anxiety (expertly explored in Stephen Cave’s Immortality). Proponents of transhumanism are often well-off, white men, but they are also often atheists. For me, a predictable transition away from belief in metaphysical immortality would be toward a desire for literal immortality, an attempt to cure death. So yes, none of us want to die if being dead is being gone. But maybe something the death festivals can teach everyone (atheist and theist alike) is that we can be immortal, at least for a short while. We can live on in the hearts and minds of our loved ones, our communities, our nations. It can be done. It’s already being done, all over the world. We spend our lives trying to achieve great things, build great things, do great things, all in a bid to be remembered. But what if remembrance didn’t need to be earned or procured through heroic effort? What if remembering our dead was part of the social fabric, the culture? I think more of us would go to our deaths feeling a sense of sadness, yes, but also a sense of belonging and comfort. Perhaps, as Irvin Yalom said, our culture would finally provide the proper protective clothing to withstand the icy chill of mortality.
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Spend some time reading about death festivals and tug on the universal threads, the secular comforts and insights that can be turned into tools for living with your own grief. Can you pick a few days each year to celebrate and remember? What about a few times each day? How would your dead want to be remembered? Did they have a favourite recipe you could make, a favourite place you could visit, a favourite movie you could watch? And, perhaps more importantly, let your loved ones know today how you will remember them. Ask them how they want to be remembered! If our most universal sadness is that we’ll be forgotten, assure your loved ones that they won’t be.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? No, because almost every festival has some supernatural component, but the author is atheist and everything is passed through a secular lens.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? A grieving woman travels the world’s death festivals.
Who should read this book? Atheists interested in death and grief and parties! But really, anyone who suspects that there’s something valuable to be learned from those who face death and don’t look away.