Let’s talk about death, baby

death

Curious to come across Death Cafe.

At Death Cafes people come together in a relaxed and safe setting to discuss death, drink tea and eat delicious cake. The objective of Death Cafe is “To increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives”. Jon Underwood founded Death Cafe in 2011 based on the work of Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz. Bernard offered ‘Cafe Mortels’ in Switzerland and France. Jon was already developing a project to get people talking about death and immediately knew that Bernard’s vision clicked with his.

Searching on my zip code, I found (within a large-ish geographic radius) 7 events in the next 6 weeks and 3 that just passed. I can’t speak to the attendance levels or quality of the events but this strikes me as a notably well-established movement.

The Death Cafe site is one of the projects by Impermanence, “a not-for profit social enterprise that undertakes innovative work around death and dying.” Seems a challenging but wide-open area for innovating.

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