Death Cafe in Marrickville
A write up of Death Cafe Marrickville
By mknight
A write-up for Marrickville Death Cafe - April.
Our Death Café this month took place on Anzac Day. It was the 100th year celebration, and the ensuing week of media coverage and related conversation was rivaled by that of the attendees at Death Café Marrickville!
Discussion included news of Australia’s first body farm, the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research, which is to be located on a 48-hectare bush site in the lower Blue Mountains, an upcoming public lecture, Naming the Dead, featuring forensic scientists reporting on recent research, and the coming to Australia of the irrepressible Caitlin Doughty, mortician extraordinaire who will be speaking at a number of public engagements.
As always, people talked about their experiences of death and in response to my comment that I am constantly amazed at the incredible diversity of death-perspectives toward and experiences of death or death-related events, one attendee astutely drew the connection between diversity of death-perspectives and diversity of individual. It was an important point. Death is not a one-size-fits all affair, it is uniquely individual and every person’s relationship with death will have to be different because we are all different human beings who have different attitudes, life experiences, understandings and expectations so naturally that will influence how we all ‘do death’.
Associated with death is grief, and that was also a topic of discussion. As I listened to people share their experiences, as I did mine, I observed a theme emerging from the conversation; self-transformation. Death, bereavement and grief all act as catalysts for change in the life of the individual, which can manifest in various ways. One attendee wrote a book talking about recovery from grief, another started a shroud-making business which brings family and friends together to create works of love as opposed to works of art, and me, well amongst other things I completed a PhD in bereavement, grief and after-death contact. What was also emerging from the conversation was that death teaches us about life or as someone said, “death gives us an opportunity to live our life”.
My feeling is that death does teach us how to live, and why, but all too often when we start to contemplate the meaning of death in our lives we might in fact already be standing at death’s crossroad. We need to ensure that this doesn’t happen, so in a sense we need to pre-empt death, which is one of the reasons for the birth of Death Café Marrickville; to offer a space whereby that can take place.
We must be aware of the fact that death stalks us and we never know when it will meet us. At this moment I am reminded of something said during a lecture I attended in 1995. “A person should always act as if he was going to die tomorrow, yet he should treat his body as if it were going to live for many years. The first cuts off the inclination to listlessness and makes the person more diligent. The second keeps his body sound and his self-control well balanced.”
There was discussion around the growing movement of green or eco-friendly burials. A green cremation process I wasn’t aware of, Aquamation, had all of us wondering why so little was known about this as an option for disposing of deceased remains. Also, locations of green burial sites; apparently there is a site in the Blue Mountains but again, some of us weren’t aware of that. In relation to Billy Connelly’s television series which looked at death and dying, people wondered at the morbid approach; where does it come from and why? Is it the grief we feel at the death of someone close, is it the nature or circumstances of the death, or is it our fear of the unknown in that we know that we die but we don’t definitively know what happens on the other side of death?
Despite all of us leaving Death Café with possibly more questions in our minds than answers, one thing remains saliently clear; Death Café is the very place where those questions can be thoroughly explored and discussed in detail.