Wednesday 23 January 2013

Death Cafe Sonama, California - Great news! Two Death Cafes in February!



By Linda Siniard

Please join us for our next Death Cafes Sonoma:
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Saturday, February 23, 2013

2:00 – 4:00 pm
1005 Gravenstein Hwy. N., Sebastopol, CA 95472
RSVP: lsiniard@mac.com

If you plan on attending, please RSVP. We want to make sure there’s enough tea and cake! We’ll also have plenty of other yummy snacks.

Bring family, friends, and associates who may be interested. If you’d like to add something special to our altar table, please do – a photo, a memento, flowers, artwork, a rock, keys…anything that reminds you of someone special.

Our open cafe with its casual conversations about dying and death may provide a time for you to think about and more clearly define your own thoughts about consciously living your life to its fullest. People who attend death cafes come from many backgrounds and bring interesting and engaging perspectives to our topics. Worldwide, some are regularly employed in end-of-life care – hospice nurses and administrators, funeral directors, estate planners, attorneys, green burial facilitators, ministers, homecare assistants, and the like. Others find us out of personal loss, and include grocery store clerks, baseball coaches, students, massage therapists, marketing specialists, writers, artists, truck drivers, and stay-at-home parents.

No matter how you identify yourself, you are likely to find death cafe participants have something in common with you. If nothing else, all of us share this – we’re going to face the end of our lives at some point, and the ends of the lives of those we love.

Our mission is simple: To bring this conversation out of our closets and into our living rooms, community centers, faith centers, and board rooms. How about starting in our cafe here in Sonoma County?

Edit - second Death Cafe organised:

The National Public Radio (NPR) and I have agreed on their visit to Death Cafe Sonoma on Saturday, February 23, 2013. The station found an interest in Death Cafes through the Tea Magazine article.

While many of us feel our intentions in discovering the gifts of dying and death are deeply personal and not for publication, we also feel this topic is ripe for investigation. How many times have you started a conversation about your losses and found your audience uncomfortable with the details, with your feelings, and with your demands for an audience who won't look away? My stories are numerous. I hope you will find the interest from a media organization is welcomed. All of us will, in fact, expire. And, unfortunately, many of us will experience the loss of our loved ones in timely and untimely passings. Our stories are paramount in the cultural explorations of our time on these subjects.

Death Cafes are not intended to influence or advertise. They are meant to simply open the conversations of dying, death, and bereavement to our communities. Won't you join us in sharing our mission?



Facilitator

My name is Linda Siniard and I live in Sonoma County, California. I am a PhD student at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Transformative Studies department with a focus in thanatology, the study of dying, death, and bereavement. I come by this interest through deep personal losses of family and friends, and a genuine desire to share my insights through research and practice. I am one of the lucky ones. I have found many gifts through a long standing search for meaning and my external abilities to communicate effectively on subjects that defy consistency, definition, reason, and accessibility – dying, death, grief, and renewal.

1 comment:

  1. I have been Blessed with many death experiences. One was when my Mom was passing, my husband and I were with her. My hand was on her left shoulder and she felt very rigid, like she was really hanging on to stay around. I began to see the Spirit of my older Sister, Marlene. She said "Okay, I'm here now, I'll take over." She went from the foot of Mom's bed to between the bed and the wall and disappeared. Mom's shoulder just dropped and she relaxed and took her last breath. As if to say "okay, I am not alone or afraid to go now, Marlene is here to take me."
    And she peacefully passed at that moment. By experiencing this vision, it helped me to let go, knowing Mom did not have to be alone because she always hated going anywhere alone. I was so relieved to see the beautiful peaceful look on Mom's face.
    Thanks for letting me share.

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