Early in the summer, I found myself upstairs at The Hearth, a women’s co-working and community space in north west London. I was there to attend my first Death Café, a space where strangers meet with the specific intention of talking about death. The brainchild of Swiss sociologist and anthropologist Bernard Crettaz, who arranged the first in 2004, the concept came to London courtesy of Jon Underwood. In a video about the café, he says there are four main principles: they are organised on a not-for-profit basis; they don’t lead people towards any conclusions or course of action; they are always respectful of different beliefs and opinions, and there is always tea and cake.
Underwood, who passed in 2017, used to describe the sessions as “naughty” – and there is something about discussing death that feels illicit. When I sat in that circle of 10 or so strangers sharing my deepest fears around death and dying, it initially felt shameful. But by the end of the session, I felt free. There is no fixed agenda; the discussion is whatever you desire to bring to the circle. It wasn’t a grief support group, just a neutral space. We spoke about our discomfort with how so much of the media that we consume avoids death while alluding to infinite life, be it around AI or skincare. We spoke about anticipatory grief, and the struggle of loving someone so much you start to mourn them while they’re alive. I had a place to put my anxieties and suddenly felt less alone.
I found myself there because I had met a death doula, Rebecca Illing, at a party a few weeks prior. Death doulas, as End of Life Doula UK puts it, are “compassionate, trained companions who support individuals with a terminal diagnosis and those important to them”. I met Rebecca by chance, in a social capacity, but somehow, between the competing sounds of music and conversation, amidst the clinking glasses and circulating bowl food, she managed to carve out space for me to grapple with my thoughts about death. Illing lost her parents and her brother within a short space of time, leaving her with no living relatives. Experiencing such devastating loss is what drew her to the profession, and she even started an annual family bereavement camp in honour of her brother, Alex.
After she told me about her work, I found I was unable to hold back a barrage of thoughts that I now realise had been suffocating me. A fear of death was tainting all of my relationships – and by extension my approach to life. When I was 14, my neighbour and childhood friend, Nana, passed away at 17. My parents had me young, and I hadn’t yet suffered the loss of grandparents or even great-grandparents. Losing Nana was my first encounter with death, and her untimely passing instilled in me an obsession that I could mute but never fully shake. Most young people associate death with old age – if they give it any thought at all. But I experienced it as something that could happen to me or to someone I loved at any time. Maybe even tomorrow.
Before she died, Nana and I would spend hours on our shared balcony dancing to Brandy’s , or recreating scenes from in grainy videos that we’d share on Facebook. Her Ghanaian family hosted big parties in their tiny flat, and I’d sit outside with her cousins, mouth watering as I waited to try different West African delicacies for the first time. After her passing, my fear that the same thing would happen to someone else I loved came to be ever-present. My parents are separated, and when my dad dropped me home at the end of our weekends together, I would press my face against my bedroom window as he drove away, praying under my breath that he’d make it home safely.
The terror became less pronounced over time, but shortly before my 21st birthday, my granddad died suddenly while on holiday back in Jamaica. It took me months to feel normal again. Only in his 60s and apparently healthy, he – like many Caribbean elders – had always spoken about death with a theatrical flippancy. Somehow, all that joking fooled me into thinking he was immortal. Over the last two years I’ve lost childhood friends, people I knew as a student, mutuals I’d see at events and nights out. I lost three great-grandparents in what felt like a flash, and then another close relative.
It dawned on me that at 30, I’ve attended more funerals than I have weddings or baby showers, and with no way of voicing my jumbled feelings around grief, over time my love for friends and family had become inextricably linked to the prospect of death. I appreciated them even more than I might have otherwise, but I was also afraid that our closeness would make losing them unbearable. Every moment carried an outsized emotional weight. Every goodbye felt final. I was so ruled by my fear of death that living felt almost impossible. As Sam Keen writes in the prologue to Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death: “The terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious… we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.”
My afternoon in a Death Café taught me that we all hold these illogical superstitions around the subject of death – as though talking about it might somehow hasten its arrival. But as I know from personal experience, that avoidance can be corrosive. My fear of mortality had a grip on my life and was rendering me frozen; my efforts to avoid thinking about death actually meant it was on my mind constantly.
In that space, surrounded by strangers, I was able to vocalise and finally release the weight I’d been carrying. Though my fear of losing loved ones and even my own mortality hasn’t entirely gone away, it is no longer the primary force that shapes my life and decision-making. I don’t have to love someone for fear that they might be taken from me. I can love them just because.