Death cafe write-up: November 2019
Our last Death Café for the year was a quiet affair yet nonetheless the conversation was as captivating as ever. A Death Doula, working in a hospital setting provided a wonderful insight into how the medical profession is beginning to work alongside these incredible practitioners, while another attendee talked about their relationship with spirits, in particular those residing in the vicinity of the old Quarantine Station and in the city of Parramatta surrounds.
As for myself, listening to and sharing in the conversation, I couldn’t help but marvel at the mystery of life, of death, of grief and at our purpose in being born. It has been an eventful year for Death Café, with ‘regulars’ and new folk attending each event and though the topics of discussion have been varied, there has been, over the months, a persistent theme.
That theme is the afterlife. People want to know if there is an afterlife, and if so, what happens there. What is life like there and once we get there, what then, what do we do? While I have my own belief in and view of what happens in the afterlife, so do many faith traditions and religious belief systems and world views. Irrespective of who believes what, there is something glaringly obvious; the possibility, or perhaps certainty, that there is an afterlife.
So then the questions form in the mind … Why are we born at all, why not just exist as spiritual beings in the spiritual universe? Why do we have to live as embodied beings in order to be born into the spiritual universe when our death permits it? What is our life for? Now that is the question to ask oneself, and that’s what Death Café is all about.
Until next year, may God bless and keep you all safe.
Your Death Café facilitator, Michele
