Hosts of “death cafes” are reporting a global surge in demand for honest conversation about “the nitty-gritty of dying,” and say the COVID-19 pandemic has made frank discussion about our mortality more necessary than ever.
“In these difficult times, as death comes closer, it’s very important to have a forum to talk about our fears and anxieties,” said Sue Barsky Reid, a psychotherapist who chaired the UK’s first death cafe in 2011 and now coordinates, with her daughter Jools, the international movement that has established more than 10,000 similar meetings in 70 countries over the past decade.
She added that hosts around the world have quickly moved events online as interest grows in the social franchise, which brings together strangers in an accessible, respectful and confidential space to reflect both on the finite nature of life and also how they might best plan for its ending.
Photo: Bloomberg
Nicole Stanfield, organizer of the Taunton, Somerset, death cafe, held two online events over a recent weekend and welcomed virtual visitors from across England as well as one from France.
“It was amazing to see the geographical spread. I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest, but people are looking for answers. We’re only going to see more death during this pandemic, so people are suddenly thinking about living wills, advanced care discussions and funeral planning,” she said.
Hosts in the US describe a similar online effect, despite the physical restrictions of lockdown.
Photo: Reuters
“People are being forced to face their own mortality every waking moment,” said Megan Sipe-Mooney, who organizes cafes in Missouri. “There’s a huge need right now and I’m getting lots of requests on our Facebook page. I’ve been training other hosts in how to host virtual death cafes and make sure tea, coffee and cake is still present.”
The reference to cake is not flippant: Proper refreshments are fundamental to the relaxed and often upbeat atmosphere that death cafes aim for, and which marks them out from a more traditional counselling or educational setting.
Death cafes have become a global phenomenon, spreading across Europe, North America and Australasia since Jon Underwood held his first one in September 2011 at his home in Hackney, east London, chaired by his mother Sue.
Underwood — a Web developer and Buddhist who died suddenly in 2017 — had been inspired by the Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, whose stated mission was to liberate death from an atmosphere of “tyrannical secrecy.”
Conversations have become far more practical since the outbreak, said Aly Dickinson, a death cafe host based in Exeter.
“People are realizing that deaths during this pandemic won’t be what they might have envisaged, or thought of as a so-called ‘good death’ — gently slipping away, surrounded by family and friends. So the conversations are about how death from COVID might look now — for example, people may decide they do not want to be hospitalized and receive invasive medical interventions or face restricted visiting from loved ones,” she said.
Dickinson has been involved with half a dozen cafes since the pandemic began, in her role as secretary of End of Life Doula UK, a membership organization for death doulas, who provide non-medical support to those with a terminal diagnosis.
“They want to discuss the nitty-gritty, like: Will I be able to get out to register the death, could we have a wake remotely, how do we share grief and memories when we’re apart? People are wanting hard facts and information about what dying of COVID-19 is actually like. Maybe there’s not quite so much laughter, as the mood is more serious,” she said.
With cafes also planned in Australia, Canada, Japan, Denmark and beyond throughout this month, some hosts said that the gradual embrace of online meetings might allow death cafes to extend their support even further.
“We’ve talked in the past about how nobody wants to discuss death and dying, and suddenly that conversation is right in front of us, in the media and also our own families and communities. So at the death cafes that have taken place since the pandemic, the biggest change is that people are talking about death in a here-and-now way, rather than as something distant,” Dickinson said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS