On every second Tuesday of each month, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery hosts a “death café.” This is a salon-style gathering where guests can have an open dialogue about mortality and death. The death café movement has its origins in England starting around 2011. It is now a world-wide practice that takes place in offices, coffee shops, and other unusual places in dozens of nations around the globe. Amy Cunningham, a death educator and funeral director who facilitated the meeting at Green-Wood said that death “cafes are a kind of beautiful rehearsal for coming closer to death and understanding it and grappling with it, so that when we do have a death pending in our families, as is inevitable, we might be a little more prepared for it and slightly less rattled.”
See Alexandra S. Levine, New York Today: A Sunny Day at the Death Café, The New York Times, March 27, 2018.
Special thanks to Lewis Saret (Attorney, Washington, D.C.) for bringing this article to my attention.
