Eating Cake at the Death Cafe

When a friend hesitantly mentioned that she was attending ‘Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living’, a whole weekend of talks and events centred around the subject of death, I smiled and replied that I’d love to go too. It’s always nice to find a kindred spirit.

So on an overcast Saturday, I found myself waiting in a queue for a poet to write me a personalised poem about death. There was an exhibition of coffins from Ghana. The Samaritans were on hand.  It was that kind of day. As I waited, my friend was approached by a beaming woman wearing a badge which invited us to ask her about the Death Cafe. The name alone was intriguing. After weighing up our options about whether to go to a talk about children and death (grim), or to go to the Death Cafe event (equally grim, but with free cake), we reeled off Eddie Izzard’s ‘Cake or Death?’ routine and declared: ‘CAKE PLEASE!’

We were ushered into a conference area and seated round a circular table with eight other ‘guests’. There was a black table cloth and black napkins. A small vase of carnations made a forlorn centrepiece. Our table was hosted by a psychotherapist named Sue, who explained that Death Cafe has been running as a pop-up event in a house in Hackney. It is influenced by the ideas of Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz who set up the ‘Café Mortalis’. The premise is simple: strangers come together to discuss death and eat delicious food. Their objective is ‘to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives’.

So where do you begin with such a vague, vast subject? There was no formula to the discussion, which made for an awkward start as people struggled to break the ice. Indeed, there was no real cohesion or direction to the stories and thoughts throughout the hour, just strangers tentatively sharing their own experiences of something which inevitably touches us all in one way or another. Questions weren’t directed towards individuals and nobody was forced to share anything. People simply volunteered what they wanted, which led to some uncomfortable silences.  Fortunately, an articulate anthropology student who studied burial rituals was forthcoming in sharing interesting information from articles she’d read. This rescued the conversation and led to discussions of fascinating subjects, such as the practicality of keeping the bones of your cremated relatives and the modern dilemma of what should happen to your Facebook page when you die.

Bringing together strangers to talk about death is a brilliant way of learning about traditions that are different to your own. I found out about Jewish funerals and the mourning period in Caribbean cultures. I also discovered things from my own culture that I’d never even thought of. For instance, I had no idea that you don’t have to be buried in a cemetery: your own back garden is a perfectly legal place to lay your loved one to rest, right beside the petunias and long-gone pet hamsters.

Amongst the other attendees were a lady whose mother had donated her body to medical science and a funeral director who envisaged funeral parlours which look more like high-street shops, with shiny glass display cases in the window to show off the coffins. The event had attracted some decidedly odd characters, such as ‘Crudgie’, a man with a wild explosion of facial hair and a leather biker helmet, who ate his cake using the fork attachment on his Swiss army knife. He didn’t say much, except to crack a few jokes about things people were saying, which seemed out of place.  That isn’t to say that the discussion was entirely morbid and humourless though. We all raised a smile at a story about a woman who’d bought herself a wicker coffin and was using it as a laundry hamper before she died, in order to get her money’s worth.

Halfway through we were indeed served the promised cake with ginger, honey and lemon tea. I have to say, it wasn’t especially as twee as you might imagine; more like politely accepting the refreshments forced upon you by an insistent elderly relative at a wake. The beverage choice only seemed to enhance the peculiarity of the situation; evoking memories of trying to stave off colds during the winter, as if to remind us that we are all ultimately frail and mortal.

The last part of the session shifted focus and was spent discussing life, presumably so we wouldn’t leave the table with heavy hearts. It seemed surprisingly difficult though for anyone to think of things they’d like to do before they died. Our hostess vowed to write letters to two women she hadn’t spoken to for years due to some feud, but the rest of us were struggling to find things to say. Whether we were already living lives of no-regrets, or whether we just unable to stop thinking about death by that point, who knows?

Overall, the discussion was disjointed yet eye-opening. Even with my limited experience of death and loss I found it fascinating. Understandably, I don’t think it’s a subject most people want to dwell on all the time and I can imagine people thinking that it’s a strange way to spend an afternoon. However, in a forum such as this and made cheerier with tea and cake, there is no reason why we shouldn’t be more open and progressive about discussing  a universal subject which remains something of a taboo in our society. Death Cafe has plans to branch out from their Hackney home and encourages people to hold their own meetings. So if you ever get the opportunity to attend one of these dark tea parties, I urge you to give it a try. You’ll be almost guaranteed to meet a weird and wonderful selection of people and it’ll certainly give you food for thought.

http://www.deathcafe.com/