Member-only story
I Run The Local Death Cafe
It started with being told I had five years to live. I was ill with a heart disease. Residents came to my room and we chatted in hushed voices at night about what the future might look like — and how much future might be left. I’d been admitted after turning blue at an ultramarathon I was participating in and kept for observation, seeing all sorts of medical professionals who were curious about my case.
When I was released, I was scared and stunned, looking to my partner and friends for support that never came. I wanted to — needed to — talk about the prospect of dying. And I was only thirty-eight, a far cry from a life fully lived. Yet no one wanted to have a dialogue with me about it.
So I went looking for death and dying groups online and found Death Cafe, a group founded to normalize the conversations around end of life and all forms of death. Already a user of Meetup, I formed a local chapter of Death Cafe online and began setting up monthly meetings.
The first meeting went something like this:
“Hi, I’m Harper and welcome to you all today. Let’s go around and say who we are and why we’re here. I bet that will be plenty to kick us off.”
And so it was.
There was a mother whose high schooler had committed suicide, a man whose parents were aging and refusing to do estate planning, someone interested in learning more about green burial. And then there was the person with a terminal diagnosis. She wanted to live out her days surrounded by people who would meet her where she was at. She decided that included us, people who could speak openly about death without the fear that they were going to die just from talking about it.
She and I formed a bond during those last months of her life up until her death, talking about how we wanted our memorials to be like and how getting granted more time felt. We both passed our marks of when we were supposed to stop living; getting more time is a more complex situation than it might seem. Her celebration of life was a beautiful and well-attended gift she gave to us all.
And life went on, continuing to meet once a month. We get our heaviest numbers around Easter and Christmas and continue to gain new people, honest with where they’re at in the land of the living. It’s a place for people who have recently lost people close to them, to those doing estate planning, and to human beings. We’ve come together and cried and laughed and been solemn. It’s been a beautiful, honored experience.
