Write up of Death Cafe Marrickville
A write up of Death Cafe Marrickville
By mknight
Our September Death Café saw us meeting in our new venue, Platform-62, a wonderfully eclectic café, and only relatively new itself, situated right in the hustle and bustle of up and coming Mascot.
Although you wouldn’t know that once you’d joined the Death Café, where discussion ranged from the board game Rebirth: The Tibetan game of liberation (available online from Amazon) to Sufi teaching stories of death and its timing in our lives, to the wonderfully entertaining Caitlin Doughty with her tales from the crematorium.
As we went around the group introducing ourselves, I was struck, as I always am, by the diversity of people who attend Death Café and the range of their life experience. Some people have had a near-death experience, some work in the human services industry as counsellors or celebrants, some are students studying death, some have had someone close to them die. But what unites everyone, is their healthy, not morbid, interest in death.
Why is that? What is it about death that draws us to itself? And why do we attend Death Café?
Perhaps it has something to do with Death Café being a “great open forum with open and non-judgemental discussion”, or because the conversation is “inspiring”, or perhaps because on occasion, the discussion invites us to consider death, dying, and the dead, from alternative perspectives. No death-related topic is off the table, which is one of the strengths of Death Café.
People want to talk about death; they want to find a sense of meaning in it as an event in their lives and not always from a practical perspective.
I am constantly reminded of the quote by E. M. Forster, “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him”. My question is, saves him from what? Ahh, perhaps that’s a question for our next Death Café!