#95 What are Death Cafés?

Today’s newsletter is about a fascinating topic: death cafés.

Death cafés are not places where people go to die.

They are events where people come together with the one purpose: discussing death.

They might also drink tea or coffee, but people who attend death cafés do so because they want to talk about their own fear of death or their worries about the death of a loved one.

Since the idea was created in the early 2000s, thousands of death cafés have been hosted in 50+ countries around the world. (see the picture below of a 2016 event in London)

At a 2010 death café in Paris, people wanted to talk about different topics:

• A pastor discussed how he dealt with his father's suicide

• One woman, whose parents had Alzheimer’s, discussed how she wanted them to die

• A 40-year-old woman who was diagnosed with cancer said that her children already saw her as dead

The first death café was hosted by the late Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz in 2004. (pictured below)

After the death of his wife in 1999, Crettaz became deeply interested in the topic of death and how people deal with it. He hosted the first death café in 2004.

He later published a book about the topic entitled Cafés Mortels: Sortir la Mort du Silence (Death Cafes: Bringing Death out of Silence).

Crettaz described his reasons for hosting the café:

A British man named Jon Underwood was so inspired by Crettaz's work that he decided to launch his own death café in London in 2011. (Mr. Underwood is pictured below in an image used to promote a podcast he was on)

Mr. Underwood also created the Death Café website, which:

• explains the basic idea of what a death café is

• allows people to find death cafes being hosted near them

• gives them instructions for hosting their own death cafes

Based on the website, there are upcoming events in Somerville, MA, Lakewood, NY, and even Bogotá, Colombia later this month. (see the flyer for a Death Café event below)

Unfortunately, Mr. Underwood passed away from an undiagnosed leukemia in 2017.

He was just 44 years old. 

After his death, his sister told the Washington Post:

She referred to a 2013 interview in which her brother answered a question about whether people feared their own death more than the death of loved ones.

Mr. Underwood said that he feared the death of his wife and children more than his own death, but:

The idea lives on: Since his death, his sister and mother have kept the Death Café website and movement going.

Volunteers help out as well, and it seems that the idea of Death Cafes will live on despite the deaths of its two greatest proponents. (Dr. Crettaz died in 2022)

My take: I love this idea. In the modern world, we all live such busy lives that we don’t give ourselves the time to reflect on questions of our own mortality — or the mortality of those close to us.

There are tremendous feelings of fear and shame that accompany thoughts of death, and we might have a hard time opening up about these feelings with our friends and family.

The death café idea is great because it allows us to come together with people we don’t know to discuss these topics. In some ways, anonymity allows us to be more honest about our feelings than we feel we can be with our loved ones.

While I haven’t been to a death café, I imagine that people leave these events with a feeling of relief that they may not have felt for a long time.

And I’m sure that talking about death makes people appreciate the time that they have on Earth with their friends and family more than they otherwise would.

Take the time to tell someone you love them today.

LEARN MORE:

If you want to learn more about death cafés, I recommend this blog by a person who hosted and attended a number of death cafés: https://talkdeath.com/what-is-death-cafe-my-experience-studying-participating-hosting-death-cafes/

The Art of Dying Well website is also a great resource. Here’s an obituary they wrote for Jon Underwood: https://www.artofdyingwell.org/founder-death-cafe-died/

ART OF THE DAY

The Waltz by Félix Vallotton. 1893.