A Visit to a Death Cafe in Georgetown

No, it’s not Halloween. But on Tuesday around 6pm, I crept out of my house to go to my first ever Death Café. I confess I didn’t really tell my family where I was going, because I didn’t really want to try to answer their questions (Where are you going? Why would you want to spend an evening talking about death? What kind of strange people attend these gatherings?) Or maybe those were just my own weird questions of myself as I slunk out the door.

For those of you uninitiated to this global phenomenon, and according to www.deathcafe.com

At a Death Cafe people, often strangers, gather to eat cake, drink tea and discuss death. 
Our objective is 'to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives'. 
A Death Cafe is a group directed discussion of death with no agenda, objectives or themes. It is a discussion group rather than a grief support or counselling session. 

So what was it really like? Well, it was a group of about 25 people who all gathered in a coffee shop in Georgetown. (Apparently 30 had RSVP'd and they had closed the numbers, but a few must have gotten cold feet at the last minute.) The group itself was pretty normal looking. All but 2 attendees (20-somethings, maybe kids of other attendees) were over the age of 50, both genders equally, and everyone keen to talk about death. I didn't see a shy person in the group. In this group it seemed that it was about 75% persons who work or volunteer in the end-of-life field in some capacity and 25% persons who simply had an interest in death because they were slightly older than the first group and experiencing lots of death first hand. 

We walked in, did introductions, ordered our own coffee and cake/cookies, and then were put in small tables of 4-5 persons. We were given a sheet of around 20 possible questions or themes to discuss. I confess our group was pretty casual with the sheet and mostly just took the conversation where it went, making sure we all had a chance to talk and then listen.  It's strange to say how quickly the time flew. We covered pet deaths, good deaths/bad  deaths we'd experienced, our families' views toward death, the many new careers in this field (Thanadoulas, Death Midwives, Contemplative Care Volunteers, Ecumenical Chaplains, Home Funeral Assistants, etc.). 

I'm almost embarrassed to say how much I felt a part of this group of death geeks. I cried a few tears, I laughed, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with these strangers. Enough so that I promised to not only drive the 1 hour commute to go back to their next gathering, but I also committed to follow through with an idea to host a Death Cafe in my neighbourhood. Stay tuned for when that is and what that's like.