It’s a delicate tango to try and eat a cupcake while a stranger details his father’s suicide. Do I steal a bite during his silent cry? Is it somehow worse to nurse the half-eaten dessert-in-waiting?
I know from experience that someone’s chewing doesn’t matter much when sharing the story of the worst day of your life. Talking—plus time—is the only cure for grief.
You get a taste of both at the death café, a kaffeeklatsch dedicated to the inevitable. These informal, salon-style meet-ups sit you in a circle and ask what brought you to talk about death and mortality—that’s it. No lectures. No agendas. They’re free, non-denominational, and have one prescript: there must be cake. Or any sort of goodies, perhaps to make the subject more palatable, the last course to talk our last stages, with tea to wash it all down.
This version of Mortals Anonymous dates back to 2004 when Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz organized the first café mortel. The idea was to break from the tyranny of death-avoidance culture in a casual European bistro setting. It inspired a British entrepreneur, John Underwood, to host his own death café from his London basement in 2011. The phenomenon went global, and at press time, there have been more than 17,800 death cafés in 89 countries.
Elizabeth Gill Lui hosts one every third Thursday of the month in Los Angeles at the Philosophical Research Society, a 90-year-old Mayan-inspired campus built for metaphysic studies and esoterica. “It’s not a workshop. It’s not grief counseling. It’s not therapy,” she tells me the day before a death café in March. She was baking, as she does every month, its own ritual and meditation. Lui, a self-described old hippie and Earth Mother, likens it to a regular check-in, where “once a month you make time for death.”
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In the hangover of the pandemic lockdown, Lui began to wake up to smell the coffee around the so-called death-positive movement, which treats a person’s dying wishes as a basic need rather than a luxury. At 69, she embarked on a Swedish death cleaning spree (decluttering both space and soul) and became an end-of-life doula. She wasn’t alone in seeking compassionate bedside care for those near death; since 2019, membership in the U.S.’s National End of Life Doula Alliance has increased sixfold. The pandemic accelerated the business of death, and alongside millions of others, Lui uncovered a brave new world of living wills, medical aid-in-dying legislation, and green burial options like human composting and aquamation (an eco-friendly alternative to flame cremation).
“When you face the reality of death, it makes you value the preciousness of life,” Lui says. “It’s not that we dwell on death but rather use it as an opening salvo of great conversation, no matter where you’re starting or where you’re ending up.”
Truthfully, I had been silently dreading this dose of death in the afternoon. Since my mom died in 2020, I’ve had years of prolonged grief followed by years of compartmentalizing to move on with my life. I also have a diagnosed fear of death that’s kept me up most sober nights since middle school, and if I could pop the death-forgetting pill from White Noise, symptoms and all, I would.
Lui opened with a quote from Faith, Hope, and Carnage, a 2022 book by the musician Nick Cave and journalist Seán O’Hagan who cover, alongside heroin dependence and band breakups, the aftermath of Cave’s 15-year-old son plunging to his death after taking LSD for the first time. “They were reaching out, but also finding a way to address and articulate their own grief,” Cave writes of his grief project, The Red Hand Files, where fans can ask the rockstar anything. “I sensed inside their questions was a need to speak about their own suffering so that another human being could acknowledge it. This idea had a profound impact on me because I felt it pointed to a form of healing through the combined acts of telling and listening.”
Questions and advice are encouraged as we go around the room. There’s no one-upmanship, no trauma Olympics. Cancer, suicide, overdose, and COVID-19 are recurring characters. And then there are talks of the little deaths that we experience more frequently and, with perhaps, more agency.
In attendance were 11 women and seven men ranging in age, race, style, and background, and about half were newcomers. There was a paranormal podcast host, a horror-genre writer-director, a former Buddhist monk, a veterinarian who provided in-home pet euthanasia, and a clown. For some, death was like a coworker, and for others, trauma and grief came for them at home. One person was there to “befriend impermanence” as she volunteered in hospice care. Another came to speak “the unspeakable truths” that she couldn’t admit elsewhere. More than once, a family member’s “letting go” or “transition to the other side” was described as “beautiful.”
Next to me was a pregnant woman. She had come not because she was afraid of dying, or of her baby dying, but because of the life she had to kill to make room for the new one. Married with an exciting and fulfilling career, she now was confronting the reality that she would soon have to choose the baby over her job. She said she was fine with whatever happens, even with miscarriage, because that’s how scared of the future she was.
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I learned that you don’t go to a death café because you’re unfamiliar with or curious about death. You might be uncomfortable, afraid, or obsessive, but you know it in your bones. You grok death in ways you never wished imaginable.
In this spirit of communion and unspeakable truths, I told the room that I felt compelled to say that there was no beauty, freedom, grace, or goodbyes when my mother died. Someone asked if it was COVID, and I said no and outlined what happened instead. I tell them about my guilt and pain and struggle, still and especially in this room, not to resent those who sent off loved ones with dignity and closure.
You inevitably leave the death café feeling more alive than when you came in. But you also shrink in that cathartic ego-death kind of way, sipping on the realization that you’re not that special or singular in your loves and fears, thoughts and experiences. Because being on speaking terms with death unlocks a secret language we’re all born with; some just learn it quicker than others. The job then becomes finding others to speak it with. For next month’s meeting, I think I’ll bake muffins.
*This story originally appeared in DoubleBlind Magazine Issue No. 11.
