On a cool Friday evening, as hundreds of people around Cambridge and the surrounding areas were gathering at bars and other watering holes to mark the end of the work week, dozens came to Mount Auburn Cemetery for tea, cake and conversations about death.
They gathered at the cemetery’s Story Chapel to participate in this year’s Death Café, an annual tradition that goes back more than a decade.
“Everyone is scared of death, even though it happens to all of us,” said Lexi Ryan, a Cambridge resident, about why she thought it was important to hold such conversations. She frequently visits the cemetery to enjoy its restful environment. “All of us know people who have passed, or we will, and I think being able to talk about that is very important.”
Participants broke off into small groups to discuss intimate personal stories about death, with facilitators from the cemetery stationed with each group, asking questions to help get conversations going.
People shared their thoughts on self-euthanasia and the dignity associated with having one’s wishes respected. Disconnects can arise in hospice treatment, for instance, said Corinne Elicone, a facilitator and the event’s host. She shared a story about a relative who was dying. “In her directives she asked to withhold food and water, and I kept walking into the hospital room and the nurse had hooked her back up to fluids,” said Elicone. “I think a lot of our medical system is geared towards prolonging life at any cost.”
The Death Café movement began in 2011 in a London basement by Jon Underwood, an administrator at one of London’s boroughs who was inspired by a similar series of ‘café mortels’ started years earlier by Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz.
Underwood soon quit his job to focus his efforts on death cafes, which have since spread to dozens of countries and thousands of locations.
Mount Auburn held its first café event in 2014 and has done so annually since then, other than a hiatus during COVID-19.
“We usually have a few people that I’ll see at each one that are return visitors, but I find that most people are new to death cafes,” said Elicone, who has been working at the cemetery for nearly a decade and leading death cafes for even longer than that, since when she was an undergraduate at UMass-Amherst.
Holding them at the Cemetery adds a layer of meaning to the event, Elicone said. “You can host a death café anywhere,” she said, “but Mount Auburn, from its founding in 1831, was meant to be a place of reflection and exploration of the themes of death, and holds a space for people to comfortably explore those things with strangers.”
Conversation over the nearly two-hour event last week didn’t only touch on somber themes. There was relatively lighthearted banter about how people would like their bodies to be handled after death – whether that be cremated, buried or turned into eco-friendly compost blocks – and if they would want to know when they were going to die.
Serious or not, “Avoiding these conversations can make grieving for loss a lot more difficult or isolating,” said Matthew Stephens, president and CEO of Mount Auburn Cemetery. Besides, he noted, “Providing a space for people to talk about death often leads to a deeper appreciation for being alive.”
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