Be sure to wear black

When I heard about “death cafes,” I thought they must be talking about Starbucks. Ga-zing!  It turns out, though, that the term refers to the growing phenomenon of social get-togethers—the venues are irrelevant—to talk about death.

Most of us don’t want to even think about death, much less talk about it. But airing out the subject can be salutary, even if the interlocutors happen to be strangers to one another. Or maybe because they’re strangers to one another. Discussing death with friends or family is almost always personal; one upshot of group sessions can be to objectify death, so as to see it more clearly, perhaps. 

“I feel better about death now,” declared one lady in a New York Times story, as she was leaving a death café session. And isn’t that what we all want—to feel better about death, in particular our own? The good Christian, of course, professes to believe—in public, at least--that there is no death, that we all live forever, either in a spa or in a furnace, or in some shadowy region in-between. Christian or not, we all fervently hope that those we have lost are “in a good place,” as one café participant’s mother assured her in a dream that she was, according to the story.

Death is a great adventure, said Captain Hook, and whether it leads to eternal life or eternal nothingness, no one knows—either way, we may end up like the writer Nikolai Gogol (go ahead and Gogol him), who died on this day in 1852, predicted with a line on his tombstone: “I shall laugh my bitter laugh.” But speculating about the possibilities can be a pretty good adventure, too.

I see that there is a death café group in Nashville. Check it out here. I wonder if it serves tombstone-shaped cookies, as one of the locales mentioned in the Times article does. I suggest something simpler but just as apropos—toast.