Review of April Death Cafe Sydney
A write up of Death Cafe - Sydney
By April Lewis
I attended the April Death Café at Black Toast Annandale. I found it to be a very open and encouraging environment to talk about all things death. I found it interesting to hear what people had to say, and what they wanted to get out of the death cafe experience. A lot of people were interested in the afterlife aspect of death. Many people had deeply personal experiences of death which they shared with us, and were fascinating to hear. A number of us had a fascination with death that goes back a decent amount of time, had near death experiences, or dealt with it in our professional lives of nursing and funeral directing. It was an atmosphere of acceptance and acknowledgement of each other’s pain, yet an understanding that we weren’t there to deal with that pain, just to talk about it and the circumstances that lead to it openly.
As a funeral director, I personally am interested in hearing people’s stories of how they dealt with the loss of a loved one. I also enjoy the opportunity to share my stories of resilience through grief and positive death experiences that I have witnessed. It is not often that I get to voice my complex opinions of death positivity so it was lovely to talk to people who were actually interested in listening.
I believe that death café is something everyone should do once. I think we are all interested in death at different levels, and it is a very enlightening experience to be able to talk about it without the taboo.
Written by Amy Porter