Write up of Death Cafe Marrickville
A write up of Death Cafe Marrickville
By mknight
It was a small but eclectic group of people who attended our July Death Café, and as usual conversation was lively and energetic and spread across a range of death-related topics. This included viewings, whether or not to have a funeral, the afterlife and, rather than normalising death, that notion that death-literacy is about re-normalising death. Although people either left early or came late, which was somewhat disruptive, conversation still flowed freely with lots of laughter in-between.
In reflecting on the event later, I recalled some of the things Death Café is not. It is not a method of community engagement, research or consultation and it is not a bereavement support or grief counselling session. Having run very structured groups previously, including bereavement support programs, I have adopted the ‘café model’ (as suggested in the Death Café guide prepared by Jon Underwood www.deathcafe.com) precisely because I’ve found that it suits a smaller group, and is one where the facilitator is present to oversee the conversation and the group in general. It is not task-focused, there are no lessons as such, conversation is unstructured and free-flowing, and other than the evaluation forms, I don’t keep statistics for later reporting. For me, that isn’t the purpose of Death Café.
There are many opportunities for people to attend structured workshops, to network professionally with others in the death and dying field, or to attend and/or participate in panel discussions. For me, the purpose of Death Café is being able to sit down, preferably in a comfy chair, and to simply have a conversation with others of like mind. That’s all. It’s a humble and modest enterprise of good will which has provided an incredible opportunity for people across the globe to talk about all sorts of things relating to death; their fears, their experiences, the afterlife, their spirituality.
In this day and age of fast-paced consumerism, glib performances, and the ‘death band-wagon’, I have always found that Death Café provides a place of refuge from the commercialisation of death, where there are no expectations, where people can talk if they want to, or just listen and reflect. I would never describe death as ‘simple’, it is anything but. However I would use that word to metaphorically describe what has always been my experience of Death Café, simple and free from the trappings of consumerism and commercialisation and an opportunity to talk and to be heard.