Events and Resources

Death may be a taboo topic at the dinner table, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Sure, death is terrifying, but it’s something that happens to everyone. We might be better off acknowledging it with open-ended conversations where we can ask questions or share our experiences. That’s the idea behind Death Cafe, a global movement to get people talking about death, dying and grief. Vancouver end-of-life caregiver Courtney Ponsford is about to launch a monthly Death Cafe in downtown Vancouver. The first meeting is 7 p.m. Nov. 21 at Art at the Cave, 108 E. Evergreen Blvd., Vancouver. “Death is messy. It is beautiful. It is uncomfortable. It is uncertain,” said Ponsford, 49, who worked as a registered nurse for 16 years. “We don’t really understand everything that’s happening around death. There’s the physiological part but there’s also this psychospiritual aspect of death.” It can be beneficial to talk about it — all of it — not only to help us face our own mortality but to help us process the deaths of people we know, Ponsford said. Grief can also come from other, more mundane situations, she said, like the end of a relationship or the death of a pet. Approaching loss as a normal part of life can make losses seem less overwhelming, she said. Some people call this concept “death positivity.” John Underwood founded the Death Cafe movement in 2011 in the United Kingdom. His model was based on the ideas of Swiss anthropologist Bernard Crettaz, whose “cafe mortels,” or mortal cafes, provided a place where people could openly discuss death. Ponsford has been hosting Death Cafes in Portland for about six months, she said, but as a Vancouver resident, she really wanted to do something more local. The Nov. 21 meet-up is not Clark County’s first Death Cafe; there have been several in the past 10 years at libraries and grief centers. However, Ponsford said she hopes to make Death Cafe a monthly occurrence at Art at the Cave. Conversations at Death Cafe are broad and free-ranging, Ponsford said. The discussions aren’t a good context for dogma or certainty, she said, because nobody really knows what happens after death. “There’s no intention to lead people or offer advice. It’s not a support group,” Ponsford said. “There’s no agenda. People just come together and talk about death.” Ponsford said that there are common themes that come up at each Death Cafe. A lot of conversations revolve around the spiritual, Ponsford said, including near-death experiences, psychedelic experiences or any state of being bridging the liminal space between the conscious and subconscious or unconscious. Ponsford said she has similar conversations with clients in her work as an end-of-life caregiver, also called a death doula. A death doula is the same as a birth doula, Ponsford said, but focused on the other end of life. Although she was a registered nurse for 16 years, Ponsford’s current role is nonmedical, she said. She’s there to provide “emotional, practical and/or spiritual support,” she said, to dying people and their families, including direct caregiving, light housework, transportation and sorting through belongings. “There are a lot of similarities between birth and death,” Ponsford said. “Birth is also messy, painful, beautiful, weird — all of those things. It’s like this passage between realms that we don’t necessarily talk about or understand.” Ponsford said that being a death doula is more like a calling than a job. She’s always felt comfortable around death and dying, she said, even from a young age. She worked in hospice care for a year, and she said it was “very eye-opening” as far as the health care industry’s approach to death and dying, and how much was out of the caregiver’s control. She said she didn’t feel like she could “participate in taking care of folks that way anymore” and moved to private caregiving, transformational coaching, reiki and finally end-of-life care. “I feel led to provide more of an unconventional, nonmedical, direct support to clients, based on my experience, my training as an RN, and my comfort with death,” Ponsford said. Ponsford said she always learns something from talking to Death Café attendees. “Every person who comes has something to offer, some wisdom and knowledge from their own experience,” she said. She said she hopes that people leave with better ideas about how to talk about death — a sort of butterfly effect, she said. The more people talk about death, the less fearful they’ll be, Ponsford said. Ponsford had an opportunity to put her theory to the test when she had a life-threatening health emergency earlier this year that ended with a visit to the emergency room. She took it philosophically, she said, without overt feelings of fear. She said she’d prefer not to die, of course, but her conversations at Death Café helped her “be more at peace with what I’m inevitably going to be experiencing.” The mood at most Death Cafés is not necessarily somber, she said. People do talk about heavy stuff, but they also make jokes and nibble on light refreshments, which Ponsford provides. There’s no charge to attend a Death Café, but donations are extremely welcome to offset the cost of food or venue rental. Most people are “very generous,” she said. “It’s pretty uplifting, actually,” Ponsford said. “People would say, ‘I leave here feeling that my heart is full.’ People are being so authentic and talking about hard things, but in a safe environment.”