What is a Death Cafe?
Next up for 26's Memento Mori: Regina Beach bids us a fond welcome to the Death Cafe, where strangers drink tea and discuss mortality.
It’s making tea in a shipping-container-turned-community-centre after hours. It’s opening the big metal gate held ajar with an old tree stump and placing chairs in a circle. It’s gathering outside in the summer when the weather’s nice, although the British climate makes the great indoors preferable most of the time. It’s enforcing the norms to seek permission to ask or comment; to not talk about death during break. Keep it light, have a snack, save the musings on the great beyond for the second half.
At a Death Cafe people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea, and discuss death.
It’s the bat conservationist’s thoughts about those late-night conversations with her co-worker whose father just died – What’s the right thing to say? How much is too much? What’s prying? What’s dismissive? – as the sonar beeps and their socks get wetter squishing in the midnight dew. What is our duty of care to someone who’s little more than a stranger, someone who’s merely employed by our employer? With whom can we have these most intimate moments, to talk about our own fragile mortality?
Our aim is 'to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives'.
It’s the childfree astrophysicist busy studying models of the known universe. He bought a house with his wife, a fixer-upper, but perhaps it’s too big for a family of two. The nagging question of “who will care for us when we’re old,” skirts around the edges of their lives –thirty-somethings unsure if the welfare state will hold enough water. Will there be anything more than a puddle when it's their time to drink?
We talk about death with no agenda, objectives or themes. This is a discussion group rather than a grief support or counselling session.
It’s the unemployed artist in purple overalls worrying that she and her partner will never be able to afford a funeral. They’ve looked at the price of caskets, at cemetery plots. The weekly grocery shop has taken precedence, will continue to take precedence over the ceremonial laying to rest of a future dead body. It has to, lest starvation take them to an early grave. What happens if you have no money to pay an undertaker? Will your body rot at the morgue?
The Death Cafe model was developed by Jon Underwood and Sue Barsky Reid, based on the ideas of Bernard Crettaz.
It’s the widower whose wife took her own life after storming out after an argument. What if... What if... WHAT IF? After a lifetime of caring for others, addicts, the unhoused, why couldn’t he take care of her? What does it say when someone would rather die than work it out? What does the grief turn into when it’s rolled up in anger, when it’s swirled through with guilt?
People often ask why we're doing this. Everyone has their own reasons for getting involved in Death Cafe.
It’s me month after month promising to make lasting powers of attorney so that my husband can make decisions should my brain stop working before my body gives out. It’s finally filling out the forms – taking action staves off a bit of the worry that chronic illness will render me unable to care for myself. Acting now may make my inevitable decline a tiny bit easier for those who are with me at the end.
Our Death Cafes are always offered:
On a not-for-profit basis
In an accessible, respectful and confidential space
With no intention of leading people to any conclusion, product, or course of action
Alongside refreshing drinks and nourishing food – and cake!
A Death Cafe is not a bereavement group per se, though many people want to talk about losing loved ones. And it’s not really a cafe either. There’s tea and snacks, but they’re free for the taking – nothing to buy, nothing to sell. It’s a place where the taboo of death and dying is removed, where everything is morbid and that’s normalised. We acknowledge our one precious finite life. We don’t know how long we have, but we likely won’t be completely ready when the time comes. At least we’ll have made an attempt to understand our fleeting impact on this life as we return whence we came: ashes to ashes and stardust to stardust.
Learn more at deathcafe.com
About the author
Regina is an American writer, artist and yoga teacher living in South Wales, UK where she specializes in content related to the arts, culture, travel, wellness and the unique people and places in those spheres. She is most at home curled up with a good book or on her yoga mat.
Thanks for sharing. I’ve seen them advertised but always wondered what went on.