The Global Spread of Death Café: A Cultural Intervention Relevant to Policy?

Abstract

New demographic and epidemiological trends mean people are dying at older ages and over long periods of time, from multiple, chronic illnesses. There is a perception that these growing and changing needs will require novel community responses. One starting point is having ‘conversations’ about dying and death, and in this the phenomenon of ‘Death Café’ merits attention. In the first study of its kind, we report on interviews with forty-nine Death Café organisers in thirty-four countries, exploring how this ‘cultural intervention’, first developed in the UK, has transferred elsewhere. Using thematic analysis, we identify competing tensions between: local translation of Death Café and a desire for international alignment alongside instrumental use of the Death Café form and its incidental effects. The passion and commitment of Death Café organisers is compelling but may not lead to the behavioural change required to support a new public face of dying.

Centering sexual and gender diversity within Compassionate Communities: insights from a community network of LGBTQ2S+ older adults

“… 44 Compassionate Communities are asked to think critically about how experiences of trauma from past, present and future contexts are considered and supported within conversations about death and dying, advanced care planning, goals, wishes and belief activities and experiences of grief and loss. 47 , 48 …”

Death Café, Bauman and striving for human connection in ‘liquid times’

“…divination, meditation, mandala paintings), and medicine/healthcare (Table 1). For more details on the recruitment and interviewing process, see (Richards et al, 2020). Our questions focused on understanding how and why the interviewee became involved with Death Café, their views on the value of talking about death and dying and what role Death Café plays, as well as questions concerning how they ran their café.…”

“…After holding the first Death Café in his private home in London, Jon Underwood went on to organise many more around the UK and published guidance to allow others to replicate the model (Underwood, 2011). The idea soon spread to the USA (2012), and thereafter to other parts of the world (Richards et al 2020).…”

“…We argue that Death Cafés are paradigmatic examples of what Bauman termed 'peg' communities, constructed to assuage the loneliness experienced by individuals in liquid modernity. We begin by exploring Death Café organisers' views about the death taboo, which is an important place to start given that their perception of a taboo on death is commonly what motivates their engagement with the initiative in the first place (Richards et al, 2020). The fact that the conversation focuses on a supposedly 'taboo' topic helps to encourage sharing and expressivity amongst Death Café attendees ultimately creating a sense of intimacy which draws the 'peg' community together.…”

“…Studies of Death Café specifically are often noticeably uncritical, often candid in their admiration, and appear, in the main, intent on normalising and furthering the initiative (Baldwin, 2017;Fong, 2017;Hammer et al, 2019;Miles & Corr, 2017). We have previously written about Death Café in relation to end-of-life policies, which are often focused on encouraging citizens to plan for death, as well as examining organisers' motivations for engaging in what has become an international initiative (Richards et al, 2020). In this article, we offer a more critical and theoretically informed account of Death Café, drawing on the same qualitative interview study of 49 Death Café organisers from 34 territories worldwide.…”