There are only two things that every single human on earth has in common: we are born and at some point we will die. It is an incontrovertible fact of life. Humans have been intentionally burying their dead for 120,000 years. Every single culture on earth has their own rituals and beliefs about death and dying. All this considered, how can something so common, so universal to humankind, be treated as a taboo topic by most people in western civilization?
What is a Death Cafe?
If you bring up the birth of a baby at a party, people will generally express some kind of joy. But try bringing up the loss of a loved one at a party and an awkward heavy silence is nearly always the initial response, followed by a change of subject. Jon Underwood developed the concept of the Death Cafe, inspired by the work and philosophy of Swiss Sociologist Bernard Crettaz. The concept is to create a safe space where people can talk about (and ask questions about) death without judgement.
No Death Cafe is exactly the same as each other but they all run on the same principles and guidelines. There is always a facilitator, often someone with some professional experience with death or dying such as death doulas or hospice nurses, though anyone can organize one. They are always non-profit, do not evangelize any particular philosophical or religious point of view, and don’t offer bereavement support. Some organizers run their groups with some structure, such as providing a “menu” of death-related topics to discuss, while others allow the group to dictate the conversation more organically.
The point of death cafes is to normalize talking about the only event in life that’s as poignant as being born, something that should be as natural to talk about as going to college, getting married, and what you plan to do when you retire.
Commonly Discussed Questions
Questions a lot of people have, but don’t feel comfortable asking are:
- How do I plan a funeral? Where do I even start?
- What does a “death doula” do, and do I want one?
- Is it disrespectful to cremate a loved one in a cardboard box?
- What is it like watching a person die?
- If I plan for my death now, am I inviting it to happen sooner?
- How soon does rigor-mortis begin?
- How would you prefer to die?
- What do you want people to remember about you when you’re gone?
How Death Became Taboo Instead of an Accepted Transition
With 120,000 years of humans intentionally burying their dead, how did we get to a point where talking about death is taboo? There are a number of major factors. Until the early 20th century, the average life expectancy was between 47 to 49 years. Women routinely died in childbirth and 20 percent of children died under the age of five. Sanitation issues spread diseases through communities like wildfire, sometimes wiping out whole families at a time.
To understand how much death was in everyone’s lives from a young age, all you need to do is visit an old cemetery and see the family plots filled with dead young people. You couldn’t avoid knowing what dead people looked like, nor what was expected of you when someone you knew died and how to talk about it.
In fact, during the Victorian era, death was such an enormous part of every person’s life from the time they were born until they themselves died, that they had more ways to commemorate the dead and grieve than any other period in human history. We like to think of them as being grossly obsessed with the macabre because of their elaborate rules of etiquette around what colors you were allowed to wear at different stages of grieving, taking portraits of the recently deceased and the habit of wearing ornaments made out of dead people’s hair. People needed a way to deal with the constant spectre of death and dying they were surrounded with. Some people spent almost their entire lives in some degree of outward mourning.
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Medical Advances Paint Death as a Failure, Not an Inevitability
Many people these days get to their middle age without ever having seen a dead body. This is a fact that would shock every person living in the 19th century. Life expectancies increased as medical interventions and practices improved in the mid 20th century. As we started living longer, we could put off thinking about our own deaths or dealing with other people’s deaths. Another factor that turned death from a daily normal topic of conversation into a taboo topic was the emergence of funeral homes.
They started cropping up as a result of the Civil War, during which there was such an overwhelming need for large official burial grounds and people experienced in handling the bodies. Funeral homes developed embalming practices which became popular by the early 20th century, decreasing the number of people preparing their own dead for burial at home. The less we had to handle our own dead, the less we had to face our own mortality.
While living longer lives is something everyone can celebrate, we have come to a point in time where we have stopped seeing death as a natural part of life, and instead view it as an unnatural enemy of us all. We have become such a death-denying culture that even doctors seem to view death as a failure of medicine. You may be wondering what’s wrong with not wanting to talk about something as grim and final as death. Why should anyone give up fighting illness, disease and age to stay alive as long as possible? What benefit can there be in talking about something unpleasant and scary until absolutely necessary?
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Acceptance Lessens Anxiety and Places Emphasis on Living Well
The simplest answer is that the more obsessed you become with staying alive at all costs, the less energy you give to the quality of life you’re actually living. Wanting to stay alive as long as possible is more about existential dread than it is about valuing the time you have to its fullest.
What many people who have attended death cafes say is that the more they talk about death with others, the less anxious they are about the prospect of loved ones dying, or about their own deaths. It makes you appreciate life more, not less. Talking about death helps people reflect more on the richness of life. It also gives them an opportunity to ask others what we can expect, how to plan for it, ameliorating natural fears most of us share.
Death is as integral a part of life as birth. You cannot have one without the other, so to celebrate both the beginning and the end of every life is the best way we have to truly appreciate the finite time each of us has here on earth.
Via the Death Cafe Website
Featured Image by Melody Zimmerman on Unsplash