Colliers Wood Death Cafe 12th May
A write up of Colliers Wood Death Cafe - May 2019
By Cecilia H
Four of us met for the May meeting of the Colliers Wood Death Café during which we acknowledged Dying Matters and the information event ‘Doing Death Differently - Are We Ready?’ the CWDC hosted at the Tooting Bec Lido Pavilion on Saturday morning.
Two of us had not been to this, or any other Death Café before. Having acknowledged the background to the movement, and the ethos of the meetings, we began to talk about a theme which ran throughout the meeting around forgiveness.
We talked about forgiveness rituals, and how important these might be at the end of life – both for the dying, and for those they leave behind. We thought about the rituals that might take place before death and how different, and potentially difficult, it might be to work towards forgiveness posthumously.
Related to forgiveness we touched upon guilt, and the place of catharsis, release and letting go, before and at death. We asked the questions – Why wait until someone is dying, or has died? What stops us from letting go? What gets in the way? What makes it difficult? What does it cost us?
We each gave thought to the questions posed by someone curiously attending for the first time, what do we get from attending the Death Café? How does it affect us in our life?
This led us to (briefly) ponder the questions: what do we consider our life to be about? What is the purpose of our life? We went on to talk about the privilege of choice, and the value of gratitude.
Our discussion made reference to the work of Brené Brown and to Edward de Bono. We touched upon several people’s experiences of the Enneagram, and Perceptual Positioning from NLP.
With thanks to all who took part.
Future dates of the Colliers Wood Death Café may be found on the Facebook page as well as on deathcafe.com:
https://www.facebook.com/DeathCafeSW19/
Our next meeting will take place on Sunday 23 June 2019.