Death Cafes and Death Salons: Where Strangers Talk About Dying

You can go your whole adult life without once saying out loud that you're going to die. Most people do. Then someone gets a diagnosis, and a family that's never rehearsed the conversation has to have it in a hospital corridor at 2am.

A death cafe is a room where people practice first. No agenda, no speaker, no sales pitch. Strangers sit down and talk about dying, then go home. Since September 2011 there have been 24,271 of them in 97 countries.^[1]

A death cafe is a group discussion about death with no agenda and no topic set in advance. It isn't therapy, it isn't grief counseling, and nobody's selling anything. The stated aim is "to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives."^[1]

The format is deliberately plain. People sit in a circle, usually with tea and cake, and say what's on their minds. Someone facilitates lightly, mostly to keep one person from dominating and to make sure nobody gets talked over.

Death Cafe runs on a not-for-profit basis and asks organizers to keep it that way, in "an accessible, respectful and confidential space" with "no intention of leading people to any conclusion, product or course of action."^[1] If you show up to one and someone's pitching prepaid funeral plans, you're not at a death cafe.

The idea traces to Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, who ran gatherings he called cafés mortels. Jon Underwood read about Crettaz's work in November 2010 and built the model that spread, with his mother Sue Barsky Reid, a psychotherapist, designing the facilitation.^[1]

The first Death Cafe in the UK ran in Jon's house in Hackney, east London, in September 2011.^[1] The same year, mortician Caitlin Doughty founded The Order of the Good Death, which became the other main engine of what people now call the death positive movement.^[2]

Fifteen years later the format has barely changed, which is part of why it works. There's nothing to buy and nothing to join.

Less than you'd expect, and that's the point. A facilitator opens by saying what the session is and isn't. People introduce themselves. Then someone says the first real thing, and the rest follows.

What comes up, over and over:

• Being afraid of the dying part rather than being dead
• A death that was handled badly and never got discussed again
• Not knowing what a parent wants and not knowing how to ask
• Guilt about relief when a long illness ends
• What to do with a body, and finding out you have more options than you thought

Attendance is usually small. Two people is a real session. Nobody's required to speak, and leaving early is fine.

People often arrive worried that thinking about death this much makes them strange. Nefertiti Moor, a death doula who runs salons at a Philadelphia cemetery, put the effect plainly: it helps people realize "I'm not alone, or I'm not morbid or I'm not wild for thinking about death."

A death salon is the same conversation held for a specific community, run by someone from it. The name nods to 18th-century French salons. The reason for the format is more practical than the name suggests.

An open-to-everyone room isn't neutral for everyone in it. If you spend the session explaining your family, your faith, or your relationship before you can get to the actual subject, you never get to the actual subject.

Moor's salons are for people of color. She's described the conditions they respond to directly: cultural norms where death isn't discussed until there's a crisis, families "scrambling to make decisions during some of the hardest parts of their lives," financial barriers to funeral planning, and mistrust of the healthcare system. That mistrust is earned, and we cover the numbers behind it in the end-of-life care gap Black families get handed.

Queer death cafes exist for related reasons. Trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, according to Williams Institute analysis of National Crime Victimization Survey data from 2017 and 2018.^[3] On top of that, people worry about being misgendered or called a former name after they die, and about a partner being pushed aside by a family that never accepted the relationship.

Those are specific, practical fears, and they need a room where saying them out loud doesn't cost anything.

Kyra Overmier, a death doula who co-founded The Art of Dying, described what the affinity format buys: "In affinity groups like this where we can come together, it just allows for this freedom."

The rules are few and they carry the whole thing.

• It's a discussion, not counseling. Nobody's being treated. If someone's in acute crisis, a death cafe isn't the right room and a good facilitator will say so.
• Confidential. What's said stays there.
• No agenda. No slides, no theme, no reading assignment.
• Nothing for sale. Not a funeral plan, not a course, not a doula's services.
• Nobody has to talk. Sitting quietly is participating.

The facilitator's job is small and it matters: start it, protect the quiet people, end on time.

Search the directory at deathcafe.com for sessions near you. Listings include online ones, which matter if you're rural or you'd rather not be seen walking into something.

Hospices, hospital palliative care teams, public libraries, and some cemeteries host them too, and those don't always show up in the directory. Call and ask.

Starting one isn't hard. You need a room, a time, a few chairs, and someone willing to say the first sentence. Death Cafe publishes its guide free and asks you to follow the model, keep it not-for-profit, and not use it to sell.^[1]

If you'd rather work through this on your own first, the end-of-life planning checklist covers the documents and decisions, and how to talk to a dying person covers the conversation you may actually be dreading.