East Kent Death Cafe Pop Up





There were eight of us this evening and everybody contributed to the conversation in some way.  We talked about:

- not being able to discuss the fact that we're dying with our friends and family and wanting to be heard, how important it is for people to be comfortable when we want to talk and how it feels to be shut down;

- someone dying in the family and no one talking about it;

- different funerals from around the world and how different cultures deal with death and whether or not that makes them more at peace with death; 

- how the Victorians used to almost celebrate death and that mourning could be quite an elaborate process;

- the effect on our health when we're not able to mourn;

- funerals and who are they really for, the person who has died or the people grieving - how much of our ego is involved in what kind of funeral you want;

- Swedish death cleaning, which was one of our favourite topics, decluttering throughout your life;

- art signifying the grieving process and dying and how powerful that can be to see;

- the shock of somebody dying suddenly, how that can affect us;

- funerals for stillborn babies and the production of death certificates

- the grief of other people and how everyone grieves in their own way; 

- keeping up appearances when grieving and how some people can expect you to grieve in a certain way, and if you don't how they can have an emotional reaction to that, how it's important to respect others' grieving process;

- suicide and the emotions you can go through as a result of somebody killing themselves, whether or not you feel you could have helped them but then recognising the importance of understanding that that's about your reaction to that event and what that means to you;

- creating an audio record/biography of a person so we can remember them when they've died and how comforting it is to have an audio recording of somebody and how you can now hire ghostwriters to write a story of your life.

 

Once again, thank you to The Quarterhouse for allowing us to use their café this evening.  

 

 


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