Discussing death can be life-affirming
REGINA — A group met at Regina’s first Death Café recently to drink coffee, eat skeleton cupcakes and learn how to make the most of their lives.
Death Cafés are designed to remove the cultural fear about death and create a time and place for people to openly discuss it.
The informal sessions are a growing trend. More than 600 have been held in Europe, North America and across Canada, including Calgary, Victoria and Vancouver, said Dwayne Yasinowski, provincial bereavement services co-ordinator with the Greystone Bereavement Centre.
“It’s a safe and comfortable environment where people can discuss mortality and death — topics that traditionally have been rather taboo in our culture,” Yasinowski said. “Talking about death ultimately helps people to understand it.”
The idea for holding and organizing a Death Café in Regina came from Marlene Jackson, bereavement co-ordinator with the Greystone Bereavement Centre.
Discussing death can help people go through the grieving process when a family member dies, Yasinowski said.
Death Cafés are not support groups, nor are they held to lead participants to any particular conclusions, he said.
“There is no agenda, simply a discussion ... They’re not meant to be morbid, they’re more meant to be more of a life-affirming event,” he said.
Twenty-six staff and volunteers from palliative care and the Greystone Bereavement Centre, ranging in age from their late 20s to 70s, were invited to attend the Death Café.
“Out of those two hours, there was far more laughing and joking and smiling than there was morbid, solemn moments,” Yasinowski said.
The wide-ranging discussion included talk about alternative funerals. One person told the group about burials that are done at a Vancouver park.
“There is a big park that is an all-natural place where families can take their loved one, wrap them in a cloth, bury them in the park and allow trees and nature to grow over top of them,” Yasinowski said. “With the proper permits and going through the proper channels, that is legal.”
Another person knew of a family who filled out the appropriate paperwork so it could pick up the body of their loved one and take him for a drive around the family farm and fields.
The group had an open discussion about whether children should see a person in their last hours at a hospital, or attend funerals.
One woman described how she plans to create a journal within an email account.
“It will be a closed email just for that, and in her living will she will have the password and the codes to it, and when she passes away it will be there for her children to open up and learn about her life,” Yasinowski said.
Because the pilot Death Café was so successful, he expects another one, which will be open to the public, to be held in the coming months.
“The discussion was about death, but it really moved into life and living,” Yasinowski said. “It was amazing to watch.”