Death cafe write-up: February 2018
Our first Death Café for the year found us gathered together on a typically humid Summer afternoon at our local haunt in Newtown, the South End cafe. As each of us tried to catch the precious wisps of air blowing through the window and up the hallway, and tried to cool ourselves as best we could, we turned our attention toward what became a lively and spirited discussion.
I was struck, as I always am, by the diversity of opinion, life experience and worldviews that attendees shared with each other, and the openness and trust demonstrated by everyone present as they talked about their feelings and concerns and as they discussed the questions they had brought with them to Death Café. Talking about death, bereavement and grief is not easy because it lays the individual bare and can leave them feeling vulnerable and exposed.
Attendees talked about what had brought them to Death Café; some had a sense of curiosity about death, some were wondering how to approach their own death and their own demise, some talked about different kinds of death, sudden as opposed to death occurring after a slow or perhaps protracted illness, and some talked about different kinds of grief resulting from different kinds of deaths.
Conversation at Death Café often seems to reveal particular themes, and on this occasion, one of those was ‘what comes next?’. What happens to us when we die? Is there something beyond death? Do we live on? If we do, where do we go? Attendees wondered if this was why we fear death, because we don’t know if anything does come next. Is this life that we live as embodied beings all that there is to our existence?
We also explored the notion of the death-denying society, which is culturally contextual. In Western culture, there is widespread agreement that we are a death-denying society and again, the ensuing discussion regarding this was rich and thoughtful as everyone present shared their points of view.
Death has been ‘sanitised’ because for most of us living in the 21st Century, death occurs in a medical setting. In earlier years, we were born, and died, at home. Death was more communal, we were more engaged with the process of the death, we washed and prepared the body for burial and we were our own funeral directors. Today, as one attendee said, “we don’t see the process, we’re just told about the death and then we go to the funeral”. How do we find a sense of meaning in that?
As we were nearing the end of our time together, one attendee raised the topic of funeral insurance ads, and in particular the marketing line, “we don’t want our children to worry”, which is the impetus for signing up for funeral insurance. This only increases the divide, the separation between ourselves and death. Is it any wonder that we’re afraid of death? Is it any wonder that we don’t understand it as the great process of transition that it is? No wonder then, that we are indeed a death-denying society.
