Death Cafe write-up: June 2018
The 2 ½ hours devoted to our June Death Café, as I’ve found with all the Death Café’s I’ve facilitated, quite literally flew past. Our previous Death Café had taken place in high summer so the coolness of a Sydney winter was a welcome relief.
People come to Death Café for all sorts of reasons, and as we each introduced ourselves common themes emerged; curiosity, being in like-minded company, wanting to explore a fear or apprehension toward death. Attendees discussed the tensions around how people die and how the type of death impacts those around or close to the deceased, different types of coffins and burials and planning and preparing for death.
There was quite a lot of discussion about advanced care planning and directives, and the importance of making our end-of-life instructions and wishes known to family, friends and loved ones. How do we ensure that these are honoured? What about possible tensions between a “do not resuscitate” directive and a doctor who is ethically bound to restore and save health and life as a primary objective?
As I listened to the conversation I wondered what I would write. And then I caught myself thinking those thoughts and suddenly realised something. As a facilitator my role is to facilitate the conversation, however Death Café isn’t just about having conversations with others, it’s about having those conversations with yourself. While I have a Will, I don’t have an Advanced Care Directive, and considering I have quite strong views regarding how I would like to die, suddenly realised the importance of such a document.
Attendees also discussed whether they had experienced a death or a death-related event, and what that was like. Accounts were intimate and poignant; attending a service and painting the coffin, the dying moments of a loved one, and being absent when a death occurred. Attendees also discussed different cultural experiences and approaches, and how death in general appears to have been ‘taken over’ by the medical profession.
One attendee who had been to a Death Café in New York, America, observed that Australians appear very conservative when it comes to death, and that at the Death Café she had attended there were all ages represented from all walks of life. This elicited the unanimous response that “we think America is conservative”! It would have been wonderful to explore this cultural difference, however as usual we had run out of time, again!
