Healing effects of opening up about death and dying
• Death Café’s first gatherings were in London in 2013 and have spread globally, including Woodstock, Cape Town
On the first Monday of every month, a group of strangers gather in a room in Woodstock, Cape Town, in the early evening.
A warm glow emanates from a bank of vintage ceiling lights. The parquet floor gleams, supporting a scattering of tables, where people sit in groups of four or five and introduce themselves while waiting for proceedings to begin.
A candle flickers atop a small metal skull. On the wall, people are enjoined to write phrases that describe death and dying. They scrawl things like kick the bucket, final curtain, the end, feed the fishes, slipped his moorings and took off her coat.
Newcomers are sometimes mildly shocked by this insouciance. Welcome to the Death Café — Mortal Monday. What brings you here tonight?
The Death Café’s first gatherings were held in London in 2013. Its founder Jon Underwood, who encouraged people around the world to discuss over tea and cake life and the finality of death, died on June 27 in the UK city. He was 44.
His wife said that the cause was a brain haemorrhage from acute promyelocytic leukaemia. His leukaemia had not been diagnosed.
In 2016 a friend’s father’s sudden cancer got progressively worse. I made myself available to him so that he could talk about it. It made me feel useful. It deepened our friendship.
Talking about death, I realised, makes one talk about life and that’s a good thing. Not talking about death, bottling those feelings and fears, is a recipe for certain disaster.
I then started pondering how my father’s mortality and how his tenuous grip on life over a 30-year period of coronary episodes had shaped the way I live. My attitudes, values, behaviours can be linked to that familiar scrape of the Grim Reaper’s knuckles against the door. The prospect of his death shrouded my life, I realised.
With good reason, I was always scared of losing him, performing for him, trying to keep him alive. When he finally “climbed the long ladder” part of me experienced it as a relief. He had a great life and a good death because he was so aware of it.
A Death Café is a gathering of people who want to discuss death and dying and how it shapes the unknown time we have left. The first Death Café meetings were hosted by Underwood and his mother Sue Barsky Reid, a psychotherapist, inspired by a Swiss philosopher, Bernard Crettaz, who initiated Café Mortel in Geneva.
Death Café is a not-for-profit “social franchise” — anyone can host one as long as they abide by the rules: no speeches or pamphlets or guiding people to a particular outcome; it’s not a trauma or grief counselling session and it is absolutely imperative to eat fine cake.
I decided to host a Death Café on the first Monday of every month for a year. A friend lent her venue, The Dining Room, another friend made our first flyer, a radio interview followed and next thing, we were full.
At the first meeting in December 2016 I had no idea what to expect.
Little did I know, as I stepped into the unknown, what a revelation it would be. Much like life, really. Can anyone honestly say they’ll be here tomorrow?
The first person I met told me how she had driven from Durbanville for a chance to discuss things her family forbade — the death of an older brother, whose shadow she still lived in, at the age of 55. He died when she was one. An elderly Afrikaans couple ruminated about why, in their culture, it was not okay to talk about death and how much they needed to talk.
Mothers confessed to feeling responsible for the lives of their children and worried what might happen if they passed away. Other mothers described what it was like to grow old and see children leave home, or suffer the loss of a partner.
Across generations and cultures, links and connections were made. I closed my eyes and listened to the surprising amount of deep and sometimes raucous laughter in the room.
It was good to see a friend talking about their ailing parents, then candidly admit his fear was to die alone. Someone said: “You’re not alone now.”
People were meeting in the most intimate ways, with respect and empathy and being changed by it. They unburdened themselves of thoughts and feelings held for a very long time and were grateful.
There are more than 4,000 Death Café’s worldwide and Cape Town’s is No 4128.
Why are people afraid to discuss death? There are many reasons. However, failing to discuss it has far worse implications, in my experience.
In recent years, I have witnessed several families being rent apart by the death of a matriarch, or even the imminent death of a father.
Family fault lines, long concealed by the rituals that held people together, crack open under the pressure of death, or death’s aftermath — a will that was experienced as unfair, or property that is contested, never mind the loss itself. Truly unspeakable things are said, hurt is done.
We have a few regulars who mostly come for the intense human connection a Death Café provides. There is no chit-chat, no small talk, no vague philosophising about the possibility of life after death.
People are authentically themselves, they speak from their own experience. Everyone gets a turn. They are vulnerable, open, brave and mightily relieved to get the rare chance to speak about something that matters so much. Their perspectives shift, as has mine.