Mark your calendars for Sunday, March 13th, as Life Forest, in collaboration with the Bookery, in Manchester, NH, hosts their inaugural Death Café! Join Life Forest’s own Director of Forest and Family Services, Cam, as he and other members of the Life Forest team facilitate their first meeting at the bookstore (844 Elm Street) at 3:30pm.
What is a Death Café, you ask? A Death Café is a gathering of folks with the aim of discussing death in an environment with no agenda, objectives, or themes. Death Cafés offer the opportunity for people to talk about death openly and without judgement and are not to be confused with a grief support group or counselling.
The Death Café model was developed in the UK in 2011 by Jon Underwood based on the work of Bernard Crettaz, a Swiss sociologist and anthropologist. Jon created Death Café as a not for profit, accessible, respectful, and confidential way for people to discuss death. The organization’s objective is ‘to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives’. Death Cafés are not a place, but an event, often scheduled at a regular interval, where people join for snacks, drinks, and conversation. There is no conclusion, product, or course of action to promote. It is simply a room filled with honest, like-minded folks wanting to talk about a topic many in today’s society consider, unfortunately, taboo.
In the years since Jon Underwood established Death Café, thousands of people have attended gatherings around the globe. Jon truly pioneered a concept that has opened dialogue on a cultural shift toward acknowledging and accepting death. Sadly, Jon died unexpectedly in 2017 at the age of 44, but his Death Cafés continue to live on and gain traction. In the United States, the first Death Café was offered by Lizzy Miles in 2012. A decade later, there are now Death Cafés in over 80 countries!
Life Forest and the Bookery are eager and excited to facilitate a local Death Café in Manchester on March 13th. The folks at Life Forest believe this is an opportunity to extend our mission to promote health, healing, and happiness. Death is something we will all experience, and the Death Café will provide us with a space to talk and connect. Life Forest hopes to regularly offer Death Cafés to those interested, so stay tuned for future events as well!
See you on Sunday, March 13th at 3:30pm at the Bookery! (It’s free, and there’s cake!)
