The 2017 Survey of American Fears found that just over a fifth of Americans are "afraid" or "very afraid" of dying.
This fear, as noted by mortician Caitlin Doughty, is almost certainly fueled, in part, by the sanitization of death in the western world.
While, in the past, relatives would keep deceased loved ones at home, caring for and dressing the body prior to burial, now, corpses are removed from homes soon after death, and typically only ever seen embalmed and presented in a way that makes them look like they are merely "sleeping".
In the video below, Doughty asks why are we afraid of death?But despite our fear of death, it is inevitable, and most of us will have to confront its unsanitized reality at some point.
When journalist and author Erica Buist's father-in-law, Chris, unexpectedly passed away, she was forced to do this after his body lay undiscovered for eight days.
This sparked an intense bout of agoraphobia that inspired Erica to go to seven of the world's death festivals in a bid to get over her fear.
She did so while writing her debut book, This Party's Dead, which is being published by Unbound in February 2021.
One death festival for every day that she and her husband did not find Chris.
VT recently spoke to Erica about her fear of death, what we can all learn from her incredible journey to the world's death festivals... and that time she was hit in the head by a corpse.
Prior to finding Chris' body, Erica said that she was horrified by the concept of death "as much as, or perhaps even more than, anyone else."
"I'd always had a generous measure of death anxiety," she said. "I was raised by death-phobic medics who once told me point-blank that 'in our industry, death means failure'.
"Which even then - when I never questioned the premise that death is always shocking and terrible - struck me as an odd attitude to take, since everyone dies and here in the UK we're usually lucky enough to get to see a doctor for the thing that's killing us."
Erica realized that she had been profoundly affected by the discovery of Chris' body after it had been removed from his home and she was struck by the smell.
"The lingering smell just enveloped me; I remember feeling like something had cracked inside my brain and was struck with the thought that I'd never feel right again," she said.
"But the real effects came later. The fact that he had been dead for eight days before we found him made me realize something that in the moment seemed entirely logical: anyone I'm not looking at might be dead.
"I started stalking everyone I knew online to check they were still alive, which of course quickly became a full-time job.
"No news is good news but no amount of it seemed to satisfy me, it was as if I was CONVINCED someone else was going to drop dead and the only way to deal with it was to be ready.
"It seems hilarious now but I honestly thought I was a genius and that the rest of you were all idiots."
Prior to the discovery of Chris, Erica had never seen any corpses in the flesh, and she never actually saw his body because her husband told her not to go upstairs.
The result was that I spent several years double-taking on the street, thinking I'd seen [Chris]," she said. "That didn’t happen to my husband."
Even after Erica developed agoraphobia, she was unwilling to confront her fear head-on, and her "disastrous attempt to 'cure' is what finally prompted her to seek help.
"The treatment for agoraphobia is to just go outside. So I went out to buy a sandwich. To be clear, agoraphobia isn’t simply a fear of going outside; it's that you have a panic attack when you do and that's the thing you stay inside to avoid.
"I was right on the edge the entire time; the air was thick in my lungs and I was barely half a breath from full panic.
"I went into the supermarket, grabbed whatever sandwich I thought I'd be least likely to drop - and then someone approached me. She was just a nice lady trying to give me a discount on Jaffa Cakes and she must have been baffled when I threw the sandwich and ran home."'
Erica had lived in Mexico before she developed agoraphobia and was familiar with the country's famous Day of the Dead Celebrations.
She was well aware that some people confront their mortality by dealing with death head-on, so she decided to google "death festivals around the world" and was surprised by how many there are."
"I decided to visit seven of them (in Mexico, Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan, and Indonesia) - one for every day we didn't find Chris," she said.
Erica said that the biggest celebration was in Nepal where the city bounced and popped "along the streets to upbeat drums and music", which she found "utterly joyful."
The "tastiest treats" meanwhile, could be found in Sicily, and she particularly enjoyed the festival in Thailand as she got to celebrate it with her father, stepmother, and extended Thai family.
"Madagascar and Tana Toraja in Indonesia were the most striking simply because those were the two festivals where the dead people themselves were invited to the party - in Tana Toraja the dead are even given new clothes and walked around, held in poses for photos and FaceTime calls from family members who couldn't make it," she said.
"The strangest thing about it was how quickly it seemed normal and loving rather than shocking. Like shining a light into the dark and realizing the monster is just a cat."
The photographs above and below were taken at Ma'nene in Tana Toraja.
The death festivals were as chaotic as many good parties are, and Erica was hit in the head by a corpse at the Turning of the Bones in Madagascar.
Pictured below, the event involves the opening of the family tomb, exhuming the corpses within, and rewrapping them in fresh shrouds.
"They are hoisted on the shoulders of the descendants who dance around with them," Erica said. "There's a huge brass band playing music, everyone's drinking rum, it's a huge party.
She said that while family members hosted a corpse onto their shoulders, they underestimated its weight and before she knew what was happening she felt "a THUNK in the back of my head."
"We all burst out laughing and they said, 'Oops! Azafady! (Sorry!)'.
"It was a strange and wonderful moment because I thought about how a few years earlier I'd been stuck indoors, so utterly consumed by death anxiety I was stalking everyone and afraid to go outside, and here I’d just been hit in the head by a corpse and it was fine."
The sanitization of death in the Western world might set it apart from other cultures, but Erica said that, fundamentally, death makes people feel the same way.
"The difference is that some of us are dealing with it well, and some of us are dealing with it badly," according to Erica. "And after doing these journeys and writing this book I couldn’t be more convinced that we deal with it really, really badly.
"The main thing we can learn," Erica said, "is that the death festivals are about carving out some time, every year to sit with death - not just with your grief over people who've died, but with your own fear of mortality."
The festivals are an opportunity for people to reflect on their attitude towards death and what is it doing for them.
"There is no other stressful, sad or frightening part of life where the recommended course of action is to refuse to think or talk about it until it's absolutely necessary - namely, when a loved one dies unexpectedly, and you’re faced with the death chores, with suddenly having to fulfill wishes you never even talked about," she said.
"We are refusing to deal with this hugely stressful but inevitable part of life until our highest moment of trauma. That’s like refusing to exercise until you've sprained something. Why, why, why would we do that?"
While most people go on journeys to discover something about themselves, this was never Erica's intention: instead, she wanted to explore how people deal with death.
"But I guess I learned that I'm pretty relentless when I've got a question I want answering (I started this whole thing before I even got a publisher, was advised to give up several times, and was then approached by an editor at Unbound when I had a tweet go viral)," she said.
As the world continues to battle its way through the ongoing pandemic, many people are finding themselves battling with mental health conditions like agoraphobia for the first time.
For them, Erica has some advice:
"First of all: hi, and I'm sorry you’re going through this, and don’t you dare be ashamed - staying indoors is as inviting to agoraphobia as lukewarm mayonnaise is to bacteria.
"Before my sandwich mission, I couldn't even spend more than a few moments looking out of the window without shuddering with horror and disgust, but the 'go outside' advice is, annoyingly, correct. Start small. Go out for a few minutes, with someone else if they’re there. Know that a panic attack can't kill you and that it gets easier every time.
"If it's available to you, therapy helps. And the super-deluxe option to stop it coming back: get a dog. It's impossible to stay indoors with those big old Disney eyes staring up at you."
This Party's Dead is available to preorder here.
