Death Cafe
The Death Cafés started, like a lot of things in my life seem to, during a workday. At the time, I spent every Monday working alongside the same hospice aide, Claudia. We had actually arranged our schedules that way, so Mondays were ours. Somewhere between patients one day, one of us said, “We should host a Death Café.” By the end of that day, we had basically planned the whole thing.
Our first Death Café was held on the third floor of an old building in Melrose. I marketed the hell out of that first one. I posted it all over community Facebook pages, told anyone who would listen, and somehow we ended up with a waitlist. It is still probably my favorite one.
That group was wonderfully eclectic. Caregivers connected with each other. There was an older couple who spoke so candidly, and hilariously, about their mortality. There was a young man from another country with an almost consuming fear of death who had taken buses and trains just to get to us that night, just to sit in a room full of strangers and talk about the thing that scared him the most. That older couple drove him home that night. The most unlikely, but somehow perfect, of connections.
All evening, the elevator kept coming up to our floor. It would ding, travel up, the doors would open, and no one was there to get off. After it happened a couple of times, I’ll admit, I was almost giddy with excitement. The ghosts of Melrose had heard about the Death Café, and they were arriving in throngs. The energy in the room had shifted. To me, it felt a little like magic.
Death Cafés aren’t grief groups. They aren’t lectures, and despite my background, they aren’t supposed to be hospice education sessions either. There is no agenda, no curriculum, no list of topics, and no conclusion we’re trying to reach. We gather, we sip tea, we eat sweets, and we talk about death. That’s it. Somehow, it’s enormous.
Over time, some of our gatherings have drifted a little more toward hospice education than I would have liked. Someone asks a question about what dying looks like, someone else asks about hospice, and before I know it, I can feel myself and my colleagues slipping into nurse mode. It’s easy to do. This is what we know. I’m realizing more and more, though, that knowing about death and making space to talk about death are two very different things.
Our most recent Death Café reminded me of that. This one was held in an old room in an absolutely beautiful library. The walls were paneled in warm, dark wood, with deep green accents that were the exact color of an old banker’s lamp. The room had that familiar smell of old books and old buildings that I can’t quite describe, but recognize immediately. I couldn’t stop looking around. I don’t know why. The whole room just felt right.
The crowd was younger than usual. There were some familiar hospice faces in the room. My boyfriend came, which for some reason made me more nervous than speaking to a room full of strangers. And I hardly spoke. I’ve thought about that since. Was that a good thing? Was I supposed to guide more, ask more questions, offer more of what I know? Maybe.
Yet, the conversation found its own way. Someone talked about doing hair for the dead. Someone talked about water cremation. Someone wondered aloud about what happens after we die. Someone else had a story about their mom. There was talk, as there often is, about end-of-life planning and preparation. I mostly listened.
I went home that night thinking about ritual. Of all the things we talked about, that was what stayed with me. The things humans have done, and still do, to care for our dead. The washing. The dressing. The tending. The sitting beside someone. The things we have ritualized over generations and the things we have slowly handed over to institutions and professionals. It sent me down a ritual rabbit hole of my own. I started reading about the ways different cultures care for their dead, the rituals that surround death and mourning, and the traditions that have been carried through generations. It made me wonder about what we’ve kept, what we’ve lost, and how humans across cultures have always seemed to need ritual around death.
I think that is one of the things I love most about these gatherings. I leave with a finger on the pulse of a community. I get to hear what people are actually wondering about when given a room where nothing about death is off limits. I hear what scares people, what fascinates them, what they believe, what they question, and what they want to understand. Sometimes one small part of a conversation stays with me long after everyone has gone home.
Maybe that’s what rejuvenated me about this last Death Café. I hadn’t spent the evening teaching about death. I had spent it wondering with everyone else. For someone who spends so much of her life around death and dying, I think I need that reminder sometimes. There is still so much I don’t know, and I think it is so important to remain teachable, to stay curious, and to resist the idea that experience makes us experts on anything, but especially something as vast and personal as death.
