Measuring out life with coffee spoons: Inside the Oxford death café

“Jaffa cake?” These are the first words I hear upon stepping into Oxford’s Death Café. We’re in the Old Fire Station on George Street, a venue for all kinds of offbeat activities: indie theatre, standup, and its kitchen, which operates as a social enterprise run by women refugees. At 5pm on a Monday, it is deserted. Already running late, I get lost on the street, knock on the wrong door, and finally blunder into a lobby where there is absolutely no noise or company. Tiptoeing timidly to the desk (and banishing mental descriptions like dead silent and silent as a tomb), I stage-whisper into an intercom: “I’m here for the Death Café.”

Was that right? Should I look sadder, perhaps? A receptionist tells me to go right; I nod and shuffle past with a solemnity that instantly strikes me as pompous. It is already unspeakably awkward.

Theoretically, I know what to expect. Death Cafés emerged as a movement in Switzerland and France in the 2010s and spread across the world. Billed as casual discussion forums, they encourage participants to engage in frank dialogue about the end of life: what is death? Why do we fear it? How does dying shape the way that we live? It is a specialist salon, a café philosophique turned morbid. Bernard Crettaz, the sociologist who inspired the cafés, wants to end what he terms the “tyrannical secrecy” around death. We should be able to discuss it without stigma, he says – the subtitle of his book is Sortir la mort du silence (‘Bringing death out of silence.’)

So far, silence is prevailing. In the Old Fire Station’s canteen, a dozen strangers sit around a table; none of them are talking (sepulchrally silent, silent as the grave). I am conspicuously the youngest. Anne*, whom I later learned is the group facilitator, heads the table. She is 84 and strikingly sprightly. Cheerfully, she slides me a cardboard carton: “Jaffa cake?”

We all take some. There’s an air of manic jollity about the whole thing; it reminds me of people who dress up as Disney princesses to visit children’s hospitals. For about five minutes, I gaze into every unoccupied corner of the room, counting tiles and committing wall art to memory. No one says a word – small-talk has been utterly disabled.

When we finally start, Anne asks us to introduce ourselves. Then she smiles and says calmly: “We’re all going to die. Not pass away, not go to a better place: we’ll die.”

It’s a bit shocking. Around me, though, other participants are nodding: a few chime in with agreement, saying that they only learnt the stock phrases as a way of sounding decent around others. “I couldn’t say ‘my dad’s dead,’ it sounds crude” – these euphemisms are not coping mechanisms but social rites, like wearing black. Someone adds that their kids are confused by decorous phrases. If her grandmother has “passed away”, does that mean she’s coming back? If she’s “gone somewhere”, where is she? We are all here to try and regain the abilities we had intuitively as children – speaking forthrightly, living in the present.

Anne’s ban on euphemisms sets the tone: we discuss the ways in which dying is sternly practical. A printout on how to arrange a Power of Attorney circulates around the group. If death is grand and mysterious (“that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns”), dying is relentlessly banal. We discuss bedsores, waning appetites, the larcenous cost of burial – someone laments that they had to take weeks off work to care for their critically ill father, despite only anticipating days.

“I don’t want people to find my body”, somebody pipes up.

“Because it’ll upset them?’

“No – I’m scared I’ll smell bad.”

Slowly, imperceptibly, the ice breaks. We talk about things we want to do before we die (for me: write a book). We exchange concepts of the afterlife. Death Cafés brand themselves as nonpartisan, “with no agenda, objectives or themes”. I do notice, however, a preponderance of Buddhists and spiritualists in the circle; a theory that we all belong to one ‘indistinct mass of energy’ is advanced and receives approving nods. It is not that these belief systems are more morbid. In fact, the opposite may be true. If death is the resetting of a cycle, a passage to one more mortal lifetime, then why fear it? Why hold it apart from – or even contrast it with – life? It is an illuminating thought, and impresses even me, the staunch nontheist. 

Interestingly, two people in the group are ‘death doulas’. Members of this burgeoning profession, including Hamnet director Chloé Zhao, pitch themselves as midwives for the end of life. While not medical professionals, they provide emotional and practical assistance to the dying. The two at the table describe their training, which includes lying in a wooden box and imagining their own funeral.

Is it useful to picture death? Is it helpful to talk about it, or just self-indulgent? Over the course of the meeting, the dread that I felt at the beginning was slowly replaced by shock, then relief. The Death Café is mundane. I had worried about lacking the special vocabulary, the necessary concepts. But what I saw was that death is pieced together from the most commonplace pieces of everyday life. Grief, tedium, guilt, vanity, humour, superstition. None of it requires a new language – just the courage to use the old one. Death is silent (as a crypt, as a vault, as a mausoleum). We don’t have to be silent about it.

* Not her real name.

Death Cafés were founded by Jon Underwood based on the work of Bernard Crettaz. Information can be found at      deathcafe.com.