Write up for the fifth Death Cafe Verona
Our fifth Death Café in Verona was held at the Casa di Ramia, an Intercultural Centre for women. And we also heard that this was the 100th Death Café in the world! Had we known we would have put candles on the cake (just joking).
There were eight participants and the meeting started in a very particular way with a beautiful and touching reading of a story written (and extremely well read out) by a mother who had wanted to express her feelings about the process she went through in a period of her life when she was faced with having to accept the possible death of her young daughter from a serious illness. It was a very emotional to listen to and it literally left us all speechless – in fact we realized that the only thing to do at that point was to attack the cheesecake! This helped us to gather our thoughts and the conversation then continued with us all expressing our thanks for the unexpected gift of this story.
In the second part of the meeting we shared thoughts, reflections and experiences related to the end of life. Of particular note was the idea of the loss of autonomy and dignity and the subsequent fear of not being able to make one’s own choices. We all felt that that it would be useful to speak more about this period of our lives, both in groups and on a social level in order to be able to die in a more humane way.
The words which came up in the feedback for this Death Café were: frankness, calm, respect, sharing, freedom, courage, acknowledgement, gift and tenderness.
Our thanks to everyone for participating and making all these meetings special!
