Tuesday, May 29, 2012

The first Death Cafe in the U.S.


Hello all!
Sadly, I have had many synchronicities that I have forgotten to blog in the past month.  I have been working on getting funding so that I could host the first Death Cafe in the United States.  A Death Cafe is a pop-up event where people get together to talk about death and have tea and yummy cake.  To learn more about my efforts, click on the image above or here.  If nothing else, I do think I made quite an amusing video about my fear of Death by Crocodile.

To learn about the established Death Cafe events in England, visit Deathcafe.com

As you may know, I am actively involved in hospice and palliative care advocacy and what keeps coming up is that people in general, and specifically Americans, are averse to thinking or talking about death.  We see families at end-of-life who have never had the conversations about their wishes.  Not only that, the individuals who are dying themselves have always avoided contemplating their own deaths.  Now, if you're a reader of this blog, I'm guessing you're far ahead of the general public.  Still, I bet you know people who don't ever want to talk about anything more serious than the weather or last night's game.  To clarify though, this event is free from ideology.  The attendees decide what they want to discuss related to death.  We are in no way drawing them to any kind of conclusion.  I'm looking forward to the synchronicities with the people who attend.

I first heard of the Death Cafe when someone blogged about attending one in England.  Jon Underwood runs them there and he has now had hosted many, with increasing success and attendance.  I am so grateful to him for allowing me to use the Death Cafe name and for his openness in general.  He's one of the good guys and we both passionately believe in the need to raise the roof on death awareness.  He was just contacted by someone in Australia who might host one there.  Imagine if this could be worldwide!

Now back to the synchronicities... I promise to get back to posting them.  Everything seems to have fallen in place so well with this Death Cafe program, I can't help but think that I was guided to do this.