Death Cafe write-up: April 2019
Our April Death Café welcomed cooler temperatures, a blessed relief after months of hot and humid weather in Sydney. My philosophy in running Death Café has always been that whoever turns up is meant to be there, plain and simple, and this came to the fore today.
Over the last few months I’ve been rebuilding my websites, one of which had a bulk email function, which for me was a blessing. Since sending my last Wix shoutout, in a year far, far away, I’ve been trying to organise my email communication through several different services. The most recent was MailChimp and just when I thought I had everything ready to go, the inevitable happened and everything shut down. The moral of the story is this; whoever turns up, turns up. And that’s exactly what happened.
I’ve always believed that Death Café is about the quality of conversation, not how many people attend, and that was certainly true of our April death Café. Whereas on average 7 to 10 people usually attend, on this occasion there were only 2 attendees and myself. Now one could be forgiven for thinking, “Oh no, what a disaster!” but in fact it was the complete opposite. For a start, between us we had an accumulated 150 years of life and professional experience, and the conversation, well that was not only delightful, but deep and rich.
It never ceases to astound me at Death Café, at how generously people share, in such a frank way, intimate and very personal aspects of their life, their knowledge and understanding of end of life matters, and their spiritual belief systems. And our April Death Café was no exception. One of the topics which I found particularly interesting was our discussion around the fact that often people who have not been overtly or demonstratively religious during their life, will on their deathbeds seek spiritual counsel, or request attendance from a priest.
We wondered about this. What is it within us that even if we haven’t perhaps acknowledged a higher power, or thought overly about it during our lives, makes us instinctively reach toward it in the hour of our need? Why do we take comfort from that? Is there something intrinsically spiritual buried within us that perhaps calls to its own, that lives within us even though we may not recognise it? And then what about the conflicting accounts of near-death experiences and people who report out of body experiences versus those who ‘die’ and report that there is no afterlife, that all is blackness, like the well-known account of media mogul Kerry Packer?
And that was just scratching the surface!
