"Death Café” sounds like a gruesome event, but not in the eyes of more than 50 people who showed up at Lovett Library in February to learn about this burgeoning movement.

There are some 5,000 such “cafes” around the world, mainly in the United States. Currently, the Philadelphia group meets in Center City, but if there is enough interest, one can be established here in the Northwest. They currently meet in the coffee shop at Barnes & Noble, 18th and Walnut streets, on the last Monday of the month.

As the organizers say on their website (deathcafe.com), “At a death café, people drink tea, eat cake and discuss death. Our aim is to increase awareness of death to help people make the most of their (finite) lives.” That’s what happened at the Lovett Library event. And the conversations are so individual that I feel I must make this a personal report. 

We broke down into tables of about six people each, and the 10 or so tables had 10 different conversations. The facilitators proposed some questions that might be useful to start a discussion, but the participants hardly needed that.

The information people shared is supposed to be kept confidential, but it is possible to talk about some of the general topics that came up. At our table, we had a variety of ages, ranging from 39 to mid-70s. We talked about belief or nonbelief in an afterlife. We talked about cremation versus burial. We talked about personal issues in our lives that would have a bearing on how we might like to be remembered. We talked about advance directives and how they might influence what we think about death. A common theme was how hard it is to talk about these issues with members of one’s own family; all the people in our group confessed that they had not discussed them with their children.

As we summarized what we talked about, several of us agreed with the comment that we are not sure if we would return to this type of meeting, but we felt stimulated to discuss these issues with our children.

The session was facilitated by Pat Bubb, who has been active in death café groups for seven years, and Simcha Raphael, who is also a bereavement counselor. We also heard from the Lovett librarian, Marsha Stender, who incidentally has studied death rituals in Mexico. Marsha is eager for Lovett to be a community center for all kinds of groups and urged people to think about organizing a local death café.

This get-together was organized by the Northwest Coalition for Healthy Aging, whose members are Weavers Way, Ralston My Way, Northwest Village Network, East Falls Village and UU House Outreach.