Death Cafe Marrickville
A write up of Death Cafe in Marrickville
By mknight
A write up of Marrickville Death Café – March, by Michele Knight
Our March Death Café dovetailed with the NSW State Election. It was a busy day in the community at large as it was in Lazy Bones Lounge, with animated and varied discussion between people coming from all walks of life and experience.
As usual, people talked about what had brought them to Death Café, and how they had found out about the event either through word of mouth, social media, Meet Up, or one of the other on-line avenues I utilise. People also talked about different events their lives, and one of the things that has become apparent to me is that many people who attend Death Café have had an interest in death-related or metaphysical phenomena since their childhood. This sense of other-worldly phenomena and/or interest in ‘what happens when we die’ is generally experienced in isolation however sometimes this is not the case.
A mum and son who attended fascinated us all with mention of Mediumship training which precipitated a discussion attempting to quantify how spiritual beings and associated phenomena are “seen” or experienced. Are they seen with the physical eyes, or as I attempted to describe, with “eyes inside eyes”? Is that seeing objective or subjective? When a spiritual being is seen, is that being transparent or solid?
The recent terrorist event at the Lindt Café in Martin Place was also a topic of discussion as was the impact of the event on the community. Although I haven’t been to the café either prior to what had happened or after it, others had, laying flowers and in general paying their respects and in general highlighting the resilience of the staff and community to carry on despite the despair and tragedy of what took place.
We wondered at the circumstances that defined a good death, and importantly on whose terms that definition was determined. We talked about the shift in location for dying in that whereas once death was largely confined to the home since the turn of the century there had been a gradual relocation of dying and the dead from the home to a more medicalised environment. We also discussed representations of death, for example, the University of Hogansburg which is dedicated to the study of bodies in various natural settings in order to observe the factors influencing decay and decomposition, as we did briefly Gunther van Hagens, the Gernan anatomist who developed the technique of plastination which when applied to dissected bodies freezes them in time for all to see.
As always the time flew by and before we knew it our time together had come to an end. In clearing the table I took a moment to sit down to read through the Evaluation Forms. I’m particularly interested in the three words people use to describe their overall experience of Death Café. As I read each form different words caught my attention; fun, open, warm, interesting, thought-provoking, comfortable. I think it was the word “comfortable” which my eyes settled on. If we can become comfortable with talking about death, wouldn’t this then be a foundation for possibly facing our fears about death? I wonder ...