How to Host a Death Cafe - Informed Final Choices

The purpose of a How to Host a Death Cafe workshop is to support the promotion of Death Cafe events that:

Provide a warm, inviting, secular and confidential environment for participants to enter into discussion about death;
Act as a springboard for deeper awareness, consideration and investigation of end-of-life choice and disposition; advance directives; home funerals and the creation of end-of-life support groups within the community.
Provide a group-directed discussion of death, with no agenda, objectives or themes.

The Death Cafe movement began in the UK in 2011, and has spread throughout the world. Those who participate in a Death Cafe come away, for the most part, with a sense of happiness and satisfaction from feeling supported in sharing their deepest views and concerns around their own mortality, as well as receiving reflections from others during the cafe.

Death Cafe can be an ongoing event where participants continue to meet monthly, bringing friends and relatives.

Having now hosted several Death Cafes, I look forward to doing so: it’s an honor to create a space in which individuals feel comfortable in talking with others about the (in our culture) taboo subject of death. I believe the most common thing conveyed to me after these events, is how it seemed to ‘free’ the participants. Funny how talking about death, can make one feel so alive!
– Malina Feder

Informed Final Choices (IFC) offers logistical support to those wanting to host a Death Cafe in their area.

To request for information about this workshop, contact us today.

I came to a death café
a few months after my husband died
I was pretty fragile at the time
as I had just had my lung removed as well,
in most gatherings
people come together to talk about the ordinary things that make up a life
here we come together to face our own mortality,
to say goodbye to the wonder
and the heartbreaking beauty
of it all,
While drinking tea
I listened to others
and shared my own experience of loss and grief,
there was a deep stillness in the room,
my heart became so tender
and I felt held,
and knew in a deeper way
no matter what happens
all is well ,
the more I come to terms with my own mortality
the more fully alive I become,
it seems like death is nothing more
than the child going home,
I look with great curiosity
to the wonder beyond, at sixty
I am facing the greatest adventure of all-
the final call.
– Norah Tunney