Death Cafés

Where people congregate to share experiences about death:

Death Cafés help repair our relationship with farewell rites, largely because they put ritual back into death and mourning. A Death Café is a ritual space, built chair by chair, cup by cup. Its ritual objects are the tea tray, pot, milk jug, tablecloth. These mundane items are essential to how it works. Guests sit around a table and commit to staying for the duration (usually two hours). The host holds the space, administers ritual objects (pen and paper) and performs any rites (pouring tea, cutting cake). …

For a long time, it never occurred to me that what brought me to my first Café — a desire to understand my fear of death — masked a deeper terror.

It took many more mugs of tea around strangers’ tables. It took hearing about a shy 19-year-old’s loss of his father, and how a car crash had subsequently killed his step-dad. It took the pretty funeral director whose kayak had overturned while she was white-water rafting, confessing that as she began drowning she felt nothing but joy. It took the white-haired hypnotherapist, draped in chunky beads, saying how only that morning she’d been bagging up her dead husband’s clothes. It took these and many more Death Café confidences before I realised that death had always been easy to be afraid of, like a bump in the night: the spooky face at the window — out there, but still far away. Life, on the other hand, was here, now, and it was far more treacherous.

I no longer see death as some looming avenger, but rather as a final change in life’s constant flux. I know that chewing it over can help us reflect decisively on our existence, whether we’re devising ‘bucket lists’, or attempting to come to terms with the ‘unfinished-ness’ of living: accepting that the knots of our lives will always remain frayed, or undone.