At Congressional Cemetery, monthly talks have a death positive focus.
The rules were simple for the group gathered on creaky wooden chairs in a cemetery chapel just as the autumn sun began to set.
“This is to talk about death,” said Laura Lyster-Mensh, after offering tea, cookies and chardonnay to everyone in the circle. “Not about grief. … This is only about our own relationship to death.”
This is an October evening at the Death Cafe.
It’s not a Halloween thing or a spooky gathering of Goths, necromancers or funeral addicts, even though we’re close to Friday the 13th. This is part of a global movement aimed at making it okay to talk about that thing — let’s be honest — even more inevitable than taxes.
“What I wonder is: Are we afraid of dying? Like it’s going to suck?” one man asked. The group maintains a code of anonymity, like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. So I agreed to keep names out of this story. “Or are we afraid of death?”
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In some cultures, death celebrations, preparations and plans are not a weird thing to talk about. There is the festive Día de los Muertos in Mexico and death cleaning in Sweden. And Tibetan sky burials offer the bodies of the deceased to vultures, using death to feed life directly.
The Death Cafe is a way to promote “death positivity,” to encourage death discussions beyond the United States’ relegation of death to spooky Halloween decorations, horror movies and somber funerals quickly organized by soft-spoken undertakers.
Our Death Cafe on Capitol Hill dodged all that, tackling these existential fears and the truths about the way much of society confronts — and, more pointedly, denies — death.
“People just tell it like it is,” said Jon Underwood, the founder of the Death Cafe, in a 2014 speech after he began the movement in his East London basement. “They tell their truth. They say things you feel have sort of fermented inside them for years and years and years. And in the Death Cafe, we create the space where they can finally let them out, and it’s a beautiful and wonderful thing.”
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Underwood, a Buddhist who chucked a respectable career as a strategy and business development director to evangelize about the need to talk frankly about death, modeled these gatherings on the “cafés mortels” held by the Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz. Since Underwood’s first Death Cafe in 2011, nearly 17,000 such meetings have been held in 85 nations.
In D.C., they are held monthly in the storied Congressional Cemetery, where Lyster-Mensh, 62, is a death doula who helps moderate the gatherings.
The cafes are largely anonymous, they are not for profit, there is no intention of leading people to any conclusion, product or course of action, and they must include food and drink, according to the loose bylaws Underwood established.
Each of these gatherings is different, driven by whatever the circle folks want to tackle. It can include funeral plans, assisted suicide, living wills and Tibetan rites. Those are the topics we covered at this week’s D.C. meeting.
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There was a discussion about “dying kindness,” the act of love that fastidious preparations for one’s own death can be a final act of kindness to the family left behind.
One woman said her father planned everything, right down to writing his own obituary and curating a playlist for his memorial service. It gave her time to mourn properly, rather than sweat the details, she said.
I asked others for advice on how to gently suggest this to elderly family members who’ve done none of these things — without being accused of cruelty.
“I am a death doula,” one of the women said, “and I can’t get my own parents to have this conversation with me.”
There were goofy moments. Because the gathering was held in a famously dog-friendly cemetery, the meeting was interrupted by a succession of dogs that bounded in with sticks or glowing collars or jaunty coats, horrified owners racing in after them.
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The hounds of hell did little to derail the conversation.
An amateur mycologist said she’s interested in having her body composted for mushroom growth. It’s D.C., so there was someone there who worked on death-with-dignity bills in Congress and another who pointed out that the suicide of Lucretia spurred the founding of the Roman Republic.
A 25-year-old said that she was there because she dated someone who always talked about death and that it got her thinking.
Taking the time to ponder one’s mortality with tea and cookies is, of course, a luxury. Lyster-Mensh knows that.
In a city that has had at least 218 homicides this year, where fewer than 10 percent of homicide victims lived to see 40, the Death Cafes may seem indulgent.
“There is a lot of magical thinking, imagining death with being very old, with good health care, with friends and family around you,” Lyster-Mensh said. “While in D.C. and many other cities, we do have death right next door.”
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Acknowledging the persistent disparity that is baked into the region, Lyster-Mensh finds other ways to address death in the “death-positive” events she hosts at the cemetery, more structured events held weekly at the burial ground. During her Saturday event, she gives away Narcan — the drug used to reverse opioid overdoses — she invites speakers from the Black Lives Matter movement, reminding folks that it is a movement founded in death — unjust, targeted death.
The Death Cafe founder, Underwood, did not have time to plan his death, either. He died in 2017 at just 44 years old. It was unexpected and sudden, a brain hemorrhage caused by undiagnosed leukemia.
But because he spent his final years talking about death, his family thinks he lived those years more fully, voraciously and enthusiastically.
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“Jon was uniquely and unusually aware that life is short and appreciated his life fully, reflecting on this through daily practice,” wrote Donna Molloy, Underwood’s widow, in a blog post shortly after his death.
It’s the shift that Lyster-Mensh made as well in her work as a death doula, helping people write their obituaries and check off their bucket lists, having held the hands of at least 100 people as they died.
“Because we don’t talk about death, because we’re afraid of death,” Lyster-Mensh said, “it’s not always good for life.”
It’s the conclusion our little discussion group came to as well when phrases like “fleeting beauty of life” and “purposeful sense of mortality” were raised to the vaulted ceiling.
We folded up our chairs, and there were some hugs. Most people were smiling, making plans for the weekend, exchanging phone numbers as they walked, full of life, into the crisp air, past the tombstones.
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