Death Cafés

NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a very alive human (John Graham-Pole), not by ai robot.

A year ago, we launched our local Death Café here in Antigonish, and we’ve been meeting every month ever since. Up to twenty of us come together, and recently we’ve been talking about capping our numbers because of its growing popularity. We meet in our local library, but other death cafés meet in homes, restaurants, and even cemeteries. We often have guest speakers, but sometimes we suggest a topic and simply split up the time so that everyone’s voice is heard without interruption. Rather than being depressing or morbid, talking about death and dying turns out to be life-affirming. There is no judging, analyzing or evaluating, and we respect everyone’s confidentiality.

A Swiss sociologist, Bernard Crettaz, started death cafés in 2004, which he called a café mortel. His purpose was to break the tyrannical secrecy surrounding the topic of death. It then moved on to England a few years ago, and has now been embraced by many other countries, including Canada and USA and most European countries. It was an English friend who told me about death cafés, where they get called “pushing up the daisies” or “kicking the bucket” festivals, and sometimes take place over a whole weekend. There is now a death café in Ankara, which is held entirely in Turkish. Participants share their thoughts and feelings about aging and dying, and sometimes what they believe follows afterwards. They are called cafés because refreshments are usually part of every occasion.

Death cafés are not intended to be bereavement or counselling sessions, and certainly not a place to market particular products or services. But there are plenty of books, articles, and websites on the topic of death and dying. The New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast has published an award-winning book entitled “Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?” which tells the story of her parents’ final years through family photos and cartoons. The New York Times calls it “deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.”

The faces at our death café are almost always familiar. The women outnumber the men by about four-to-one, which is not too surprising because our average age is around seventy, and women tend to outlive men. Women tend to be  more open than men to talking about their personal thoughts and feelings. Though we rarely see much of each other between these gatherings, we have grown closer since we first gathered. We are now on hugging terms with most of our regulars. Neither Dorothy nor I have family members close by, but we fully expect that several of our regular death café participants would be quick to support us if one of us is faced with a life-challenging situation. Most of us are CFA’s from provinces other than Nova Scotia, and surnames reflect their ethnicity, e.g., India, Germany, Malaysia, and Latvia.

Some of the topics we’ve covered include talking to our children about death and dying, losing a pet, green burials, personal directives, palliative care, medical assistance in dying (MAID), and near-death experiences. Last week, our guest speaker was a gerontologist who talked particularly about frailty and how we can assess it as we grow older. She gave us all pocket-sized cards entitled “Clinical Frailty Scale,” which ranges from being very fit for our age (score 1 on a1-9 scale) to terminally ill, with a life expectancy of less than six months (score 9 on the same scale).

Louisa Horne, who offers green burial services through her social enterprise Epilog, runs regular death cafés in Halifax. She and her assistants came to talk to us about green burials. It turns out you can be buried on your own property in Nova Scotia, once you’ve done the necessary paperwork and let your neighbours know your intention. We’ve picked out a plot that has plenty of room for both our caskets, and our friend and death café participant, Sian Gwynne, who builds caskets made almost entirely of willow has built both of ours.  We participated in braiding the willow for the final trim.  I’m using mine as a coffee table in our living room, and Dorothy’s is upstairs in her office, where she keeps it full of her botanical art supplies. I should quickly add that we’re not planning to make use of our caskets any time soon.

The growing popularity of death cafés seems to be because waiting to talk about it until we’re confronted with its reality is too late. Expressing our feelings and beliefs on death and dying has helped many of us all become clearer about the many aspects that confront us as we grow older, including cultural rituals and funeral wishes.  In Nova Scotia, the personal directive form is available online:  https://novascotia.ca/just/pda/_docs/PersonalDirectiveLongForm0311.pdf  After all, life is what you might call a terminal condition: so far everyone who has been born into this world has gone on to die, except those of us still alive.