Death Cafe at Expressive Art Exhibition

A write up of Death Cafe Hong Kong

By Carmen Yau

It was a lively Sunday afternoon with nearly 40 participants in the Death Café Hong Kong on 27 July 2014. The event was held at the Love Soar Children Grief Awareness Expressive Art Exhibition.

The venue provided a warm and relaxing environment so that people felt free to express themselves and make friends with strangers around the table. All participants are local Hong Kong people and the whole event was held in Chinese.

We understand that Chinese may find it difficult to discuss about death. Therefore, we created some little paper rolls with quotes related to death and encouraged them to pick from the cup and share their views and feelings after reading it. They found these paper rolls helped a lot to facilitate the discussion. Some shared their views about having a very simple/no funeral as they thought death is a way of relief. On the other hand, some expressed that discussing death with their loves one is difficult and find it heart-breaking just to imagine their loss in the future.

After two sessions of small group discussion, we distributed 2 postcards to our participants and encouraged them to write one for themselves and one for their love ones. For the postcard they wrote for their love ones, we mail them after the event so that they can continue the discussion and share their experience in Death Café with the receiver. For the one for themselves, we plan to mail maybe 1-2 months later as a reminder.  

We found the postcard writing was helpful. When we have the last sharing where everyone sat together in a big circle, some of them had more ideas on what they want to share and express. With these facilitations, our participants found the event rewarding and encouraging. 

Comments

Add a comment

Name:

Title (optional):

Comment:

Please enter the text below (spam prevention):

Submit