Tiny paper skulls
Death Café flouts taboos by breaking the silence around mortality. Talking about death is more jarring than talking about sex but, on at least one Monday night a month in Cape Town, people discuss it freely — and talk about what it means to be alive. A man with a silver ponytail talks about his wish to die by sailing into a storm, on the night I attend. He’s recovered recently from a stroke which left him wondering how he would fulfil this dream if he could not move. Also he needs a boat.
A woman with long, ringed fingers and an American accent talks about her friends dying far away, and about the inexplicable body shock she felt at the moment her young niece went into a coma halfway across the US, before she heard about it.
A poised researcher talks about the death of a former addict in a car crash. Until that moment his life had seemed to be going smoothly.
These three were sharing a table with me inside a cheerful restaurant in Woodstock, where much of the conversation revolved around the right to die the way we want to.
The mix of honesty, irreverence and grief around the tables of four was gripping — and people really listened to each other. And made connections.
When the man with the stroke had been in hospital, he was visited by someone he had met at Death Café.
Death Café host Sean O’Connor says the intense human connection is what draws people in, and makes them come back.
Mostly, though, they come to talk about death in all its forms, particularly how it affects loved ones who don’t want to talk about it. Our table talked about anguish at the suffering of those we loved. Fury at the wantonness of death. Relief at escaping death. The freedom to choose our death. Nothing is off-limits. I’m not averse to talking about death. At least, that’s what I thought until I realised, on the way to the meeting, that I’ve blocked out deaths in my life including the death of my beloved parents.
2017: my father, a devastating loss. 2013: my mother, whose death released her from pain. 1987: 21-year-old close friend in a car crash, suspected security police involvement. 1991: charismatic friend and political leader, assassinated. 2003: close young friend drowned. 2005: family friend, hijacked and shot. New Year’s Day 2018: mountain club buddy, fatal accident.
Strangers also join this gallery of ghosts, like the woman who broke her neck on a mountain bike ride in front of me. Or the pedestrian I tried to resuscitate after he had been run over.
But ghosts and rattling skeletons are absent in The Kitchen on this night, where about 20 people warm the space. The only symbols are tiny paper skulls on toothpicks stuck into a cake, and a lit candle on a metal skull.
People are invited to write words about death on a poster to the side of our table: Eventually. #Grandfinale. Freedom.
Pushing up the daisies (remember Monty Python?) were among the contributions.
We had chocolate ganache cake, coffee and tea — preferably no booze to dilute the experience —and a compulsory half-time ritual, when you can switch tables if you want to.
After the cake our groups chose to join together in a circle to talk about topics ranging from a planned trip to India to witness burning bodies on the Ganges, to
‘Death is the ultimate ice-breaker, and the intimacy is poignant and exhilarating’