Picket line
CUPW members strike at the Canada Post facility on Penn Road Tuesday morning. They started the 24-hour strike on Monday at noon. This is all part of rotating strikes across the country.
It’s taboo, it’s feared, it’s generally a topic of discussion that’s avoided at all costs but eventually every single person must deal with it at one time or another.
It’s death.
To start the conversation that most people find uncomfortable at best, Brent Goerz, a local health care social worker for more than 17 years, is hosting a Death Cafe on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. at ArtSpace, above Books & Co., followed by a living boxes art installation from 4:30 to 7 p.m.
“The death cafe is not a grief group,” Goerz said. “It’s just a safe space for people to talk about death, recognizing it’s not group therapy. It’s really about people starting the conversation about death. The idea of scheduling it after Halloween is because death is uncorked, so before people avoid and stuff it back into the safe it’s in for 340 days of the year, let’s just take the day and have a conversation.”
The goal, Goerz gave the example, would be to see an 80-year-old woman who has been trying to talk to her family about her death invite her daughter to the death cafe to talk about her mortality.
“But I don’t want to limit it because there’s a lot of scenarios where people are ready to talk about death and they’ve got a family member who’s stuck,” Goerz said. “You may have COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and you’re in your 50s – and you know this is going to be what gets you.”
The person knows death is part of life and wants to talk about it, he added.
“We need to have these conversations,” Goerz said.
The cafe will have tables set up for groups of six to eight people to sit and chat and there will be three facilitators to guide the talk or redirect if necessary, Goerz said.
Following the death cafe is the living boxes art installation.
Goerz might be best remembered for his appearance on Dragon’s Den years ago with his son to promote his simple pine boxes. The idea was to first use the box as a book shelf, hope chest or other type of functional furniture that could ultimately be used as a coffin.
Goerz invited local artists to paint individual pine panels that will be assembled to create several boxes, which will be on display Sunday evening.
“If there’s unfinished work, come and engage with the beast,” Goerz said.