Hosted by Leo Searle Hawkins

Date:	Sept. 29, 2013
Start time:	3:15 p.m. (UK)
End time:	5:30 p.m. (UK)
Address:	Beatroot Cafe 20-21 Lower Park Row Bristol England BS1 5BN United Kingdom
	Free

This Death Cafe has taken place

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About this Death Cafe

Beatroot Cafe have kindly donated the space for the Bristol Death Cafe.

We have a Facebook group for Death Cafe Bristol, where I keep members informed of events and share useful and interesting info: https://www.facebook.com/groups/deathcafebristol

About Leo Searle Hawkins

My father died first. Heart attack. He was not a happy man and I hope what awaited him on the other side was better than his experience of being alive.

Then my brother, deputy chief test pilot for British Aerospace, dived the prototype Hawk fighter into a farmers field.

Later my other brother walked, laughing and joking, into the post office near his home. And suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack.

The last member of my immediate family to die was my mother, who was 89 and went beautifully peacefully.

While these deaths were occuring all my aunts and uncles also passed away, and a friend committed suicide.

What no-one ever showed me was how the immense grief these deaths brought me could be a portal to the most profound peace.

The Turning Point

My fiancee, Jenny, died from cervical cancer on August 19th 2012.

And my world fell apart.

I was not expecting the tsunami of pain that would reduce me to a blubbering wreck of tears and remorse more times during the months that followed than I can count.

You see, I thought I knew what grief was. I’d been there enough times. I was expecting to feel pain and confusion for a while before the storm blew out. But I was not expecting what I can best describe as a nuclear explosion in the deepest caverns of my mind that ripped apart everything I knew, all but destroyed the life I had had before Jenny died – and totally annihilated the sense of who I thought I was.

Even though I’d survived the horrors of childhood emotional and sexual abuse, the waking nightmare of drug-induced psychosis, lived through two divorces and the “living death” of the loss of my young family, had overcome addictions from heroin to nicotine and lived through and successfully left behind many years of suicidal depression – I’d always come out of those experiences feeling “intact” in some indefinable way.

But when Jenny died, something in me died too. Something inside me finally broke apart, some remaining ego, some selfishness and lack of kindness that had avoided my gaze of truth over 40 years of meditation and spiritual inquiry completely dissolved and has never returned.

R.I.P

Since Jenny’s death a sublime peace has been unveiled within me that I treasure beyond all worldly pleasures and experiences.

Though I would never, ever, have wanted her to die the fact is that by consciously moving through the portal of pain that her death brought, my life has been blessed beyond anything I could have conceived possible.

What I’ve been graced to receive is usually reserved for those who reside in cemeteries: a “Resting In Peace” but while still alive in this body.

When I reached out in my own hour of need I quickly realised the immense lack of understanding of death and the grieving process in our society.

This experience led me to create the Bristol Death Cafe, so that we may come to understand death and dying more intimately – and thus overturn the taboo around death so prevailent at this time.

 

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