New Location
A write up of Death Cafe of Ocala
By Teddy
After having experimented with different locations since our start up in November 2013. We decided to try the other side of town. Our monthly meetings have usually been attended by the same group of people, averaging 3-5, with 2 or 3 new people once in a while.
We had meetings in several restaurants, which often turned out to be too noisy and disruptive. Then for over a year we met in my living room. Since March 2016 we're meeting in the Choir Room of a church on the side of town, where many senior communities are located. This led to several of our regular attendees opting out, due to the distance. But some new people coming for the first time as well.
During the past several months, we have also decided to experiment some more. Where the set-up of Death Cafe often is a pop-up, one time, or maybe a fixed number of weekly/monthly meetings. Ours were ongoing monthly meetings. After about ten or twelve meetings, we ran out of spontanuous aspects of death to talk about. We wanted to watch videos, or have a guest-speaker to delve deeper into specific subjects having to do with death & dying.
At the same time, we also had heard many times, that people didn't want to come to our meetings, because the name was too confrontational.
While the name Death Cafe for the die-hard fans (pun intended), should be confrontational, as death itself is. We also decided, that we want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to become more at ease thinking and talking about death.
So, in addition to our monthly Death Cafe, we will now also have a more passive meeting, in the form of video-presentations, guest-speakers and/or workshops, under the name Peaceful Passing. Hopefully that concept will provide a lower threshold, where people can get used to talking about death. And from there they can step up to our Death Cafe meetings :-)