A write up of Marrickville Death Café – June, by Michele Knight
A write up of Death Cafe Marrickville
By mknight
It seemed that the date for our June Death Café came around so fast this month that I couldn’t help feeling that it was only yesterday when we had last met for Death Café Marrickville, and this time as then, conversation was rich and meaningful, at times painful as tender spots were touched, open, frank and thoughtful.
As is often the case, people brought all manner of life experience/s with them. Some were recently bereaved and grieving, some worked in varying professional capacities with the aged or the bereaved and their families, and some were curious about death and wanted to explore their thoughts and feelings in an open and friendly forum.
One of the things we talked about was when we first became aware of death. For some it was when a relative died, or an animal, and the age at which that occurred; some were very young children, while others were in their teens. And while the nature of the death varied, we all agreed that “death creates change”. We also talked about the meaning of the rituals that often accompany death or a funeral, ways that people grieve, and social ways of supporting the bereaved.
Memory-making and remembering the dead was another topic raised, as was the importance of marking the death and how different this was for those who chose to do that. From photos on gravestones to tattoos on bodies, from the tiny fingerprints of premature babies to the newborn infants’ little hand and foot prints, from keepsake boxes to ashes on a mantelpiece, all of us revealed how we keep the presence of the dead with us in some way, shape or form.