Death Cafe Press Clippings
„Кафићи смрти“, популарна места у Италији у којима се ћаска о теми која није табу
Posted by Elisabetta Lucchi on May 31, 2023, 9:17 a.m.
Death Cafe and Death Cafe Verona on the Serbian national TV channel RTS. Thanks to Sanja Lucic, foreign correspondent based in Milano (Italy).
DEATH CAFE, OVVERO CAFÈ MORTEL, IL CAFFÈ DELLA MORTE
Posted by Elisabetta Lucchi on May 31, 2023, 9:07 a.m.
Thanks to prof. Andrea Aparo von Flüe, University "La Sapienza", Rome (Italy)!
Fancy discussing your demise over tea and cake? The rise of the ‘death cafe’
Posted by Brigid Haines on Feb. 13, 2022, 1:08 p.m.
Interview with organisers of Online Death Café Cymru, Sarah Hillcoat-Nalletamby and Brigid Haines. We liked the article but were concerned that it didn't credit deathcafe.com or mention that Sarah is a trainee death doula and Brigid is a namings and funeral celebrant accredited with Humanists UK.
A beautifully written account of the author's initial experience at a Death Cafe.
Альпина нон-фикшн издательство, специализирующееся на научно-популярной литературе. Сотрудники настоящие профессмоналы и четко передают мысли и факты без собственных домыслов. Приятно, что такой ресурс открыто говорит о смерти и проекте Death Cafe
Residents invited to Aylesbury Vale Death Cafe this summer
Posted by Jools Barsky on July 17, 2021, 6:52 a.m.
For one day only, residents are invited to talk about this complex, painful topic...
Why Talking About Your Funeral Now Is Tough, But Valuable
Posted by Jools Barsky on July 17, 2021, 6:47 a.m.
Death – and what you want after you die – is the conversation nobody wants to have. Unless, of course, you're librarian Andrea Castillo and have led discussions at the local Death Cafe.
"I had started as a person kind of trying to confront my own anxieties about death," Castillo explained...
ince September 2011, small groups of people across the world have gathered over tea and cake to discuss mortality. I went to one in Boulder to learn how COVID-19 and the King Soopers shooting are impacting those conversations....
At the Death Cafe, the topic is dying with a side of cake
Posted by Diana Brooks on Aug. 28, 2020, 2:55 p.m. 1 comment
People need to talk about the taboo more than ever. A Pasco group gets it done.
A conversation about death over tea and cake
Posted by Nick Wilde on May 4, 2020, 8:17 a.m. 1 comment
Kristeligt Dagblad, (Christian Daily), Tuesday, April 28, 2020 Section 1 Page 4
Coronavirus has made the so-called death cafes popular, though they must now be done online.
People around the world are grieving these days, either because they have lost family members or friends, or because so many others have died due to the coronavirus. It has made the so-called death cafes popular and launched a new edition where people who do not necessarily know each other meet across continents at virtual online cafes to work out their grief.
Nick Wilde, who opened a death cafe in Bedford in England in 2013 and later another in Newport on the British Isle of Wright in 2017, among others, is hosting a virtual edition this afternoon, Tuesday, April 28 at 4 pm Danish time, which is open to all.
"For example, one of the participants will be from Sri Lanka," says Wilde, who himself attended another virtual death café last Sunday.
"Some join because they have lost loved ones, others are health care workers who have cared for the dying. Some have taken care of dying family members and friends and need to share their experience," says Nick Wilde.
Judging by the mention on social media and the internet site Death Cafe, there have been hundreds of virtual meetings since the outbreak of coronavirus. The British newspaper The Guardian wrote earlier this month that death cafes are reporting a boom in interest.
"In these difficult times when death is getting closer to us, it is very important to have a forum where we can talk about our fears and concerns," psychotherapist Sue Barsky Reid told The Guardian.
In 2011, together with Municipal Development Manager Jon Underwood, she opened the first death cafe in England, which developed into the organization Death Cafe. Following Underwood's death in 2017, Jools Barsky Jon's sister is now the leader of the movement along with his mother Sue and Donna his wife.
Death Cafes are usually a physical meeting where participants drink coffee and like to eat cake while discussing life and death, but the coronavirus has forced them to move online. Fritz von Coelln of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, at the University of California is one of the organizers of the Death Café every week.
He has posted a clip on Youtube where you can see how he asks the 15 participants to smile and wave to each other for a start.
Usually, a group of retirees meet every Friday at the Death Café at the California Institute, where the goal is to help people talk about death. The cafe was started by Fritz von Coelln in 2013 after he lost his wife who died of cancer.
"I thought we would live forever," he told the local newspaper, the Orange County Register.
When his wife died, he ended up being able to accept death and now runs the cafe, where you can talk about grief, but also culture of death and philosophy.
At Death Cafes, as well as many other places, the outbreak of coronavirus is getting into a discussion about whether the pandemic will change our perception of death, and how humans should and can handle the many deaths. Even if you do not personally know someone who has died from the virus, it is normal to feel grief anyway, says David Kessler, one of the world's experts in grief for the American magazine Harvard Business Review.
He believes that people feel different kinds of grief, partly because you notice that the world has changed and has become uncertain.
"As an airport was different after 11.
September, things are going to change now, and it's happening right now. The loss of normality, the fear of economic crisis, the loss of togetherness.
It hits us and hits hard, "he says.
According to Kessler, it is necessary to go through a lot of stages such as denial, anger and sadness, because you feel a loss of control before you end up accepting: "It is through acceptance that you get the strength to act. we feel in control again. 'I can wash my hands.
I can keep a safe distance. I can figure out how to work virtual '. "And in that situation, a conversation with others at a death cafe can also help, as Nick Wilde explains on the phone from the UK.
"Death Cafes are especially about accepting that death is inevitable, rather than fighting. Many people find it good to meet with others and discuss it over a cup of tea and cake."
utzon@k.dk
In these difficult times when death comes closer to us, it is very important to have a forum where we can talk about our fears and concerns.
SUE BARSKY REID, PSYCHOTHERAPIST.
Death Cafes create an environment for openness in Albany, Saratoga, elsewhere
Posted by Jools Barsky on Jan. 25, 2020, 5:18 a.m.
Attending one of the Capital Region’s only roaming cafes comes with a few conditions: keep an open mind and feel free to discuss death. At least that’s the case with Death Cafe Albany. “My friends say ‘You need to change the name’ I say ‘That’s the point,’ ” said Kate Murray, one of the Death Cafe Albany hosts.
The world would change if everyone one of us attended a Death Cafe
Posted by Jools Barsky on Jan. 12, 2020, 12:11 p.m.
Sue in conversation with Jools Barsky, co-founder of the Death Cafe movement about how Death Cafes help us to live consciously for a better world...
A POINT OF VIEW, BBC RADIO 4
WRITER: SARAH DUNANT
PRODUCER: AEDELE ARMSTRONG
An evening at the Death Café
A couple of months ago, I spent an evening at a “ death café’. If that phrase
means nothing to you, then I should say immediately that it has nothing to do with
assisted suicide, shades of grey sexuality or even some misguided dress fetish,
harking back to the goth era.
On the contrary, it was an exceedingly respectable encounter. Held in a café
in a small town in Gloucestershire, a group of maybe fifteen or sixteen people who
had never met each other gathered in response to posters and local advertising. The
age range was wide: from a young woman in her twenties up through both men and
women in their 60’s or older, and for the next couple of hours in groups and
together over tea, coffee and cakes we talked about death.
Two facilitators helped to run the evening. After a short introduction, they
asked us each to say a little about ourselves and why we were there. Anyone who’s
experienced any kind of group therapy will know it’s important for everyone to find
their voice early so they will be comfortable talking more. And when the subject is
death, comfort is pretty important.
For reasons of confidentiality I can’t tell you what other people said, though I
betray no secrets if I say a couple of them were dealing with the prospect more
immediately, either for themselves or someone close. A few others had worked all
their lives in the caring professions so had experience of dealing with death, and
having moved on or retired felt this was a good time for them to think about it a
more personal way. Some wanted more practical help. Thinking ahead as what
should go into that folder to be left behind. Copies of the will, funeral plans, financial
papers, maybe the letter one wanted to write to one’s children or next of kin. Then
there were more existential questions. But if I can’t disclose other people’s stories, I
can tell you what I said. Though you’ll have to believe me when I add that I didn’t
really know what was going to come out of my mouth until I opened it. I had come –
I thought - in a rather dispassionate way. As a novelist working in history, I’ve spent a
lot of my life resurrecting the dead, yet never connected their passing with my own
and I also felt, like many people I suspect, that we simply don’t talk about enough
about it, and I wanted to confront that.
But when it came to my turn what I actually said was this: that I had been in
my early 30’s when my father died. And that his illness and death – one following
close on the other - had poleaxed me emotionally, so that I found myself drowning in
grief, a state that lasted for a debilitating length of time. That that was many years
ago now but that as an adult with grown up children myself I was worried that my
own death (which is certainly not imminent as far as I know) might have the same
impact on them. And it seemed to me that one of my last jobs as a parent was to –
well, I suppose - show them how to die well. To make it somehow part of life, so
they in turn might eventually might find it easier when it came to their own.
Looking back on it, it was a tall order for a couple of hours chat and in the
end I didn’t get talk very much about that. Which was maybe no bad thing, because
while it happened a long time ago, reliving it is still unnerving.
After a while, the group divided into two sections. Those who had come for
practical help and those who wanted – and I can think of no other way of saying this
– to find a way to) living day to day with the idea of dying.
It is the most extraordinary thing about humans – that along with our – albeit
limited ability to prepare for an unknown future - we find it very hard to accept the
unassailable fact of our own end. It is literally impossible to imagine how it will be
when we are dead. Which in itself is absurd, because of course “we” will not be
there, for it to “be” anything at all. And yet the dread remains. And with it all those
answerable questions about the meaning of life.
Historically, religion offered -and for many people still does - a terrific solace.
I have no wish to change anybody’s ’mind on the idea of life after death. Indeed,
there are times when I feel a kind of raw envy for it. Secular gurus might wax lyrical
about the joy of the evolutionary journey alla Richard Dawkins, but it doesn’t scratch
my itch when it comes to grappling with the thought of my own extinction.
For the longest time, because death so often came accompanied by
unalleviated suffering - it served to concentrate the mind mightily on what might be
to come. Heaven – like happiness – tends to write white, but walk into any church
where images of the past are preserved - and as a student of renaissance my mind is
full of them – and hell is technicolour, screaming agony.
Interestingly, when western society started on the path that would alleviate
many of the death agonies, the arrival of analgesics in the mid 19th century, the only
voices to question the wonder came from inside in the church, fearing that making
death easier might make people turn less readily to God as they approached it.
Hell is a largely discredited place these days. And death, once such a stable of
existence; infant mortality, plagues, epidemics and hundred other killer illnesses, has
much less dominion over us thanks to the astonishing progress of medical science.
Not to mention the rise and rise of consumer culture. In terms of the landmarks rites
of passage: birth, marriage and death, the first two are doing a roaring trade: the
import of baby showers from America and the current lunatic extravagance of
weddings. In contrast, death lives in the shadows – for most in takes places in the
sanitised environment of a hospital, followed by a brief ritual in a perfectly
manicured crematorium in some out of town location; opportunities for event
management strictly limited. Apart from royal or superstar deaths, there is little
opportunity for grief as shared bonding or a reason for pomp and pageant – not to
mention the expenditure that, for instance, many wealthy Victorian went in for. Our
19th ancestors may have had trouble talking about sex, but they had no qualms
going public with a good funeral.
Our lack of experience when it comes to handling death – has, not
surprisingly, made it more frightening. And it is that fear – and that silence - that the
Death Café was founded to address. It was the brain child of the
Swiss sociologist and anthropologist Bernard Crettaz – a way to challenge what he
called "tyrannical secrecy" over dying. In 2004 He began to organise and facilitate
small gatherings of people in an informal setting to talk, in whatever way they
wanted, about their own or other people’s demise. Through him and the continued
work of ts British founder, Jon Underwood, who died painfully young in 2017, the
Death Cafe has inspired thousands of gatherings in many different parts of the
world. Each in their own way, I suspect, as varied as the one I attended
So, what did we get out of the evening? Well, I’m not sure there were any
great revelations but then I don’t think that was the point. For a valuable couple of
hours, we all talked about death as if it was a part of being alive. And it gave me
some personal insight.
At a certain point, I found myself retelling a particularly raw moment in my
father’s dying. When, as I sat at his bedside – and it would have been only a few days
before he died - he said to me. ‘You know I am going to miss you so much. ‘
I think it was that admission that unlocked the sluice gates on my grief. And it
was so painful that I had decided I must never say such a thing to my own children.
Because of course, it would be them not me who would do the missing.
The facilitator listened gently, before going on to point out that it had clearly
been something my father had needed to say. In effect, it was the greatest
expression of love he could offer me. And if we were going to start giving death a
more natural place in our lives, then we, the living, would have to learn how to
better support and listen to those doing the dying. Because at that moment it was
not about us, but about them.
So, would I visit another death café? Certainly. If just to be among a group of
strangers willing to talk about something we usually ignore. As to whether it might
help me when it comes to my own dying? Alas, that is something I will not be able to
come back to tell you about.
“LET’S TALK ABOUT DEATH” | DEMYSTIFYING DEATH OVER TEA AND CAKE AT THE DEATH CAFÉ
Posted by Cat Kent on Oct. 31, 2019, 3:38 p.m.
Huge thank you to the VC Reporter and Kimberly Rivers for the cover article on Death Cafes in Ventura County, CA.