What the Heck is a "Death Cafe"?

As part of my quest to identify resources for Seattle area widows, I recently attended my first “Death Café” in Olympia. My goal was to find out if these unstructured discussions about death and dying would have any benefit for those who have lost a spouse.

My conclusion? It depends.

First, some brief background:

• The first Death Cafes were offered in the United Kingdom in 2010 and quickly spread to Europe, North America, and Australia. There are currently nearly 20,000 Death Cafes in 93 countries.
• Their purpose is “to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.”
• The meetings are organized and facilitated by volunteers who agree to abide by established Death Café rules.
• There is no cost to attend a meeting, and there is no set agenda for the meetings.
• Although it is not a support group, there is an expectation of confidentiality.

The meeting I attended was held in a conference room that quickly filled up with nineteen attendees plus the facilitator (fourteen women, including me, and five men). Most appeared to be over the age of sixty, but there were a handful of younger folks, too.

The facilitator asked us to take a deep breath and settle into our chairs. He spent a couple minutes talking about the history of Death Cafés, reviewing the guidelines for the discussion, and asked us to share what brought us to the meeting. He then asked if anyone had any subject they’d like to discuss. One participant shared that she had attended a local three-day grief retreat that had a profound (positive) effect on her. A number of attendees asked follow-up questions and information was shared about grief events, speakers, and books that might be of interest.

Although grief had been the first topic, there were many other topics discussed during the 90-minute meeting. With no set agenda, folks were free to bring up whatever was on their minds. The importance of advance directives, burial options such as human composting and scattering ashes, concerns about older individuals who might pass away while living alone, Washington’s Death with Dignity Act—these subjects were all discussed and provided ways to exchange experiences and information with the group.

The tone of the meeting was upbeat and matter of fact, not depressing. The facilitator knew when to step in and steer the conversation into new directions and had some wonderful quotes that he interjected at appropriate times (such as Confucius’s famous statement, “We have two lives, and the second begins when we learn we have only one.”).

I had no way of knowing if any attendees were fellow widows, or what other death losses anyone had experienced unless they brought it up during our brief introductions.

So why did I reach the conclusion that “it depends” on whether a Death Café might be helpful to a widow?

I think it depends on where you are in your grief journey and your unique way of dealing with your grief. For some fresh widows, it might be too distressing to hear some people speak about death in a way that can seem too detached when the searing pain of losing your spouse is still so acute. In early grief there are so many triggers that we are unaware of until we experience them, and you need to know what you can handle.

On the other hand, I have also known widows who said they felt uncomfortable in traditional grief support settings but wished there was somewhere they could talk about grief and death. You may be a widow who feels more comfortable in a setting where there is a little emotional distance, such as a Death Café meeting.

There were quite a few individuals at the meeting who did not choose to speak, so if you did decide to attend a Death Café, know that you do not have to talk and you can also excuse yourself for a few minutes if you need a moment alone.

Experiencing widowhood can cause some of us to become much more focused on the subject of death itself. This new preoccupation can be disconcerting to friends and loved ones, so I can envision how attending a Death Café might be one outlet for sharing your feelings, experiences, and concerns about what is inevitable for all of us. Even if you are not in a place right now to benefit from attending a Death Café, you may want to consider doing so at a future time.

There are more than a dozen Death Cafes in the greater Seattle area. You can go directly to the Death Café website (click HERE and select “Find a Death Café”) or you can do a Google search and include your specific location. (Not every organizer uses the main website to list their meeting times and location.)  

If you are not a widow and you are reading this blog post, I would not hesitate to encourage you to think about attending a Death Café. We need to normalize discussions around this topic in our society.

Copyright ©2024 S. Larkin/Seattle Widow Resources