Headspace Blog on Death Cafes and Mourning

Aug 14, 2017 | 0 comments

Headspace Death Cafe art large

Artwork by KYLE BECK

Death Cafe aficionados will appreciate this story on the popular Headspace blog, Death and coffee: how one cafe is breaking taboos, by Maggie Grimason. She interviewed me for the piece and came to an Albuquerque Death Cafe this summer. It focuses on the death positivity movement, and how Death Cafes play a role. A short excerpt:

My discomfort with addressing death never receded as I grew up. In fact, it didn’t even strike me as unusual, since our culture at large tends to shy away from the topic. For that reason, it was strange at first, but then liberating, to settle into a chair at Albuquerque’s Death Cafe to talk in earnest about death and everything that comes with it.

Hosted by the “Doyenne of Death,” Gail Rubin, author of “A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die,” and a certified thanatologist, this particular death café is a small branch of larger movements that have been dubbed “death positivity,” or in some instances “death acceptance.” Death cafés are some of the most visible and well-known branches of the growing movement and exist on an international scale.

Read more below.

Death and coffee: how one café is breaking taboos

A Good Goodbye