Death Cafe profile for Allie Hutchison
Location: Portugal
http://www.alliehutchison.com/
About Allie Hutchison:
Hi, I’m Allie Hutchison—writer, scientist, and end-of-life doula. After earning a PhD in geophysics and years spent studying the deep Earth, I now work in another kind of depth: the threshold between life and death.
I want to hold space for death—not to fix or explain it, but to witness it with love, listening, and openness. In a culture that often silences the conversation, I believe in meeting death gently, honestly, and together.
Through my work as a death doula and community facilitator, I create environments where people can talk freely about what we’re usually taught to avoid. Whether you’re grieving, immediately impacted, curious, or just human, you’re welcome here.
What brings you to Death Cafe?
I come to Death Café with the intention to hold space—for grief, for wonder, for the questions that have no answers. As an end-of-life doula, I’ve seen how powerful it is when people are given permission to talk about death openly and without judgment. It softens something. It connects us.
Western culture tends to avoid death, wrapping it in silence or fear. I believe in gently undoing that silence. Death Café offers a rare container where we can be real about the one thing we all share, whether we’re mourning, curious, or simply alive.
What brings me here is a deep calling to listen, witness, and be part of a collective remembering: that talking about death is, in the end, also a way of talking about life.
What would you like your legacy to be?
Leaving behind a torch in the shadows.
Thoughts for sharing:
The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Contact Allie Hutchison
Allie Hutchison's posts on the Death Cafe website
With Allie H.
June 26, 2025, 4.00 p.m. - 5.30 p.m. (WEST)
Free
A lot of us think about death, or are faced with it in an immediate way, but don’t have a space to talk about it. We're all going ...