Death Cafes springing up around the world, including Chattanooga

As a tribute to Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, artist Isabel Amorous wore bejeweled skull earrings to the debut of thje Chattanooga Death Cafe.

There are two crucial rules for a Death Cafe meeting, whether in Dakar, Senegal, or Tuscaloosa, Ala.

First, no one is allowed to force his religion, atheism or solution to a problem on anyone. The rule allows Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans and agnostics to fully and respectfully explore questions, fears, beliefs, anecdotes and mourning traditions regarding death.

The second rule is equally important.

"There must be cake," says Atlanta Death Cafe host Mark LaRocca-Pitts. "Cake is a requirement of every group worldwide that wants to be part of the nonprofit Death Cafe franchise."

Death Cafes are now a global movement, with 3,464 held in 37 countries, Australia to Zimbabwe, from Norway to South Africa - and now Chattanooga. Fourteen people came to Chattanooga's inaugural Death Cafe, held Sept. 1 at the Chattanooga Public Library. The homemade cake was huge, as yellow as daffodils and topped with vanilla/lavender-scented frosting.

Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, who created the concept of a Death Cafe in 2004, believed that sharing soothing hot tea and a delicious treat serves as an icebreaker and a bond for people from different demographic backgrounds. He thought the ambiance of a European cafe where strangers feel free to debate deep issues would foster free-flowing discussion of a topic few care to contemplate.

He wrote the book "Cafés Mortels: Sortir la Mort du Silence" - "Death Cafes: Bringing Death out of Silence" - which advised others how to host Death Cafes. British Web designer Jon Underwood, who hosted London's first Death Cafe in 2011, designed deathcafe.com as an online way for cafes to post schedules and for hosts to compare notes and problem solve.

Underwood wrote the criteria for Death Cafes on his website. To be affiliated with the national movement, cafes cannot present themselves as grief support groups or counseling sessions, which require different guidelines and trained leaders.

"The goal is to create a space where we can create a sense of community, a place where people feel safe to share ideas on a topic most people don't want to think about, including friends and family," says Taylor Hinton-Ridling, a hospice volunteer who hosted Chattanooga's debut Death Cafe.

"There have been times I wanted to share some of what I felt I'd learned at the hospice. I wanted to hear what other people thought about insights hospice residents at the end of their lives had shared with me. When I heard about the Death Cafe concept, I wanted to try it."

First gathering

At the initial Death Cafe in Chattanooga, the group asked that photos not be taken but, as the conversation unfolded, social worker Sherry Campbell described how intensely she had pondered how life and death intermingle after her beloved stepdaughter died.

Campbell told the group how exhaustion from sorrow and the funeral suddenly hit her full force when a relative agreed to run errands with her. She sat in the car while her relative ducked into a mini-market. Latent fears about death and aging and illness tumbled pell-mell through Campbell's mind. She remembered the sweet handmade birthday and holiday cards her stepdaughter created for her, all the words written in her vibrantly colored, fat-bubble font.

"I wondered whether, when I was old, at the end of my life, would there be anyone left to care for and love me," Campbell said at the Death Cafe.

While sitting in the mini-mart parking lot, she noticed an elderly woman get out of a car to try to fix its tire. Campbell gathered her energy, and she and her relative fixed the lady's tire. The lady was a professional pianist and wanted to give Campbell a gift. The woman opened the car trunk and handed Campbell her latest CD, whose cover was in neon bright colors. Fat-bubble font letters spelled out the title: "You Are Loved."

Quiet settled across the Death Cafe. Then Hinton-Ridling said gently, "In my family, when a coincidence like happens after a loved one has died, we say the loved one is winking at us from the afterlife."

Tough questions

Crossroads Hospice Chaplain Mark LaRocca-Pitts launched Atlanta's Death Cafe in February 2013. It meets in the bell tower conference room of historic Oakland Cemetery, where 27 former Atlanta mayors and six former Georgia governors are buried, among others.

He believes the beautiful surroundings make conversation flow more easily. The tower's arched windows overlook Victorian-era graves adorned with statues freighted with meaning. A tree stump carved from marble means a young life cut short; the marble hand of God holding a Bible and a rose symbolizes deep wisdom that humans only occasionally glimpse.

The Death Cafe draws attendees from all ages, races, religions, plus atheists and "a good number of pagans," LaRocca-Pitts says.

"I thought we'd get more goths," he says. "We get a lot of ink - folks with tattoos - but just an occasional goth. We have a death doula who participates. Doulas can be midwives who help with a baby's birth. Ours helps with the transition into the end of life."

When asked what the most difficult moments are, he considers for a moment, then says, "Definitely when someone attending shares that he or she has a terminal illness. People attend who have Stage 4 cancer. They don't want the meeting to be all about them. They want sharing. But I want them to feel heard. And their experience is different from someone with theoretical questions or even someone who lost a loved one."

Inevitably, there are times when Death Cafe discussion turns to the unique agony of what participants term a "bad death" - horrific murders, battlefield fatalities, gruesome accidents or a terrorist attack.

In four years of Death Cafe in Atlanta, LaRocca-Pitts has observed that words cannot impose meaning on what survivors see as a senseless death. But a truly deep discussion can give cafe participants one blazing recognition - they have been given the sweet gift of time. Cherishing time, making one's days worthwhile and meaningful is one way to honor those who were robbed of their lives, he says.

"The more we talk about it, the more we understand death can happen at any time. Life is short. When you realize this, it forces you to focus on what a life well lived means," he said.

Death's reality

Except for Hinton-Ridling and her spouse, who are both millennials, and a man who looks slightly older, the participants at Chattanooga's Death Cafre appear to be Baby Boomers, three men and 11 women. As one participant notes, even people who are fit outside and vibrant inside find death becoming more real and less abstract with each passing year.

Peter Steyn describes visiting his gold miner grandfather in Alaska, where Steyn came across entire villages built for ghosts on the Athabaskan Native American burial grounds in the village of Eklutna. Each spirit house is the size of a child's very large dollhouse, each painted bold colors. They are placed in lines as if they're sitting along streets. The living can come and leave small mementos and flowers that the dead one would have enjoyed in life.

"You can see the influence of Russian settlement in past centuries by the Russian Orthodox Christian cross on some of the houses," Steyn explains. "Overall, the effect is like that of a small village where the dead commingle and the living come to visit."

A woman, who asked that her name not be used, says she grew up with Korean traditions and the spirit houses seem like a healthy tradition that might make people less likely to avoid the elderly and the ill as if death was contagious.

"I worked in a nursing home where I saw people who never had a visitor, no family, no friends. It hurt my heart so much I had to leave that job," she says.

The discussion is so absorbing, no one hears a fire alarm until a librarian opens the door and evacuates the cafe. Participants continue to talk outside the library as three fire trucks, sirens wailing and lights flashing, roll up. When it proves to be a false alarm, several Death Cafe attendees suggest inviting the firefighters to October's meeting to get the perspective of men who potentially face death every time they go to work.

Artist Isabel Amorous wears delicate, bejeweled skull earrings to the Chattanooga Death Cafe, her tribute to Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations. On those days, which run Nov. 1-2 this year, skeletons and skulls made of sugar and cake decorate homes. Heaps of golden-orange marigolds with their clean astringent scent surround votive candles in handmade shrines at home and in cemeteries. Families carry lawn chairs and picnic baskets packed with food the deceased once loved to the graves.

"I think those celebrations of the dead loved one's life keep him alive for those of us left behind," Amorous says. "Nothing is sadder to me than seeing the graves in potters' fields where there are only numbers, no names, on the burial plots.

"There's an old saying that as long as someone speaks the dead one's name, he lives on in the heart of the ones who loved him. Maybe that is where the soldiers' tradition of reading the names of the dead comes from; it helps keep their friends' memory, the impact his life had, the joy, alive after the loss."

Contact Lynda Edwards at 423-757-6391 or ledwards@timesfreepress.com.