Facilitators Maria and Lizzy |
Columbus, Ohio Death Café #2: August 23, 2012
By Lizzy Miles
Eddie Izzard may ask you to choose between cake or death, but at the Death Café, you can have cake AND death (conversation). Twenty-one people attended the second Columbus, Ohio Death Café on August 23, 2012.
When asked what interested them about the Death Café, the attendees responses were varied. Several attendees shared that death was a taboo topic in their home and they wanted to have an open discussion and maybe learn from others. Some attendees were already working in the field of death and dying as academics, social workers, nurses, counselors, and chaplains. These attendees were quite comfortable with the discussion of topics related to dying. They hoped to gain insight of others perspectives and perhaps provide comfort. Some attendees had experienced the death of family members and were still processing what their losses meant for their own life.
Death Cafe attendees 1 |
Some of the words used on the survey by attendees to describe this event included: fascinating, lively, funny, relaxing, sharing, moving, caring, and awesome.
Death Cafe attendees 2 |
So what do people talk about at a Death Café? I get that question a lot. Maria, my co- facilitator and I were completely intrigued at how different this conversation was from the first Columbus Death Café. We do not lead the conversation, we let it flow. The topics really depend on the people in the room and their interests. At this event we talked about photographing the dead, cemeteries and genealogy, first memories of death as children, whether funerals have made us less sensitized to death, burial customs, bedside visions, the differences in the ways people grieve, shared death experiences, cremation versus burial, bucket lists and The Big Lebowski.
Refreshments for this event were funded from the Kickstarter campaign. A big hearty thanks to all the Kickstarter donors who made event this possible.
Beautiful initiative!
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