Gabrielle Gatto remembers the day her uncle Vinny died. Her family members were piled into his living room. She’d brought over bagels, balloons, orange juice, and champagne to make mimosas. Vinny had put on his fedora and asked to watch The Godfather together one last time. “Go get me Carvel,” he said. “I'm not leaving before I have one more taste of vanilla chocolate swirl.” Vinny had already met with an estate planner and sorted an advanced directive explaining his medical wishes if he lost the capacity to communicate. All that was left to do was imbibe his last Carvel and share the family sauce recipe—a classic Italian American marinara.

Looking back on it now, Gatto remembers his death as “the weirdest, most beautiful experience." But soon after, she realized that she was an anomaly. Most people that she knew and had grown up with couldn’t bear to think or talk about death.

Today, Gatto is a death doula and educator, running a variety of death-themed events at The Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Recently, she co-organized “Grieving and Weaving”—a series of evenings spent knitting, crocheting and talking about death. The group might talk about tactile and kinesthetic ways of grieving or how physical objects can be tangible reminders of the people we love. For Gatto, who is neurodivergent, the dual motions of weaving and talking about grief is particularly healing. “We've had a 17-year-old knit a crochet bikini and an 87-year-old sit with her daughter and knit a scarf for her own funeral,” Gatto said. “It's been everyone and anyone.”

Death cafes like this one are cropping up in communities across the U.S., and increasingly around the world. The concept, according to the death cafe website, is a “group directed discussion about death with no agenda, objectives or themes.” With over 19,000 registered death cafes hosted in 90 countries across the globe, these non-profit meetings provide space to discuss the practical, spiritual, and emotional aspects of life’s end, often over tea and cake. Death cafes, which take place anywhere from cemeteries to yurts to Pioneer Works, mirror our death-averse social worlds, and reveal the insufficiencies in our cultures and infrastructures that necessitate them in the first place.

The death cafe movement was born in London in 2011, when a man named Jon Underwood hosted the first event of its kind in the basement of his home in Hackney. Underwood, who worked for his local Tower Hamlets council, had come across an article about Bernard Crettaz, a Swiss sociologist who’d been hosting death discussions—Café Mortels—in bistros across Switzerland and France. Underwood was captivated. He began developing a global directory of death cafes and a guideline of how they should run, even proposing a menu of sticky date cake, granary bread sandwiches, peppermint tea and the like. Crettaz died in 2022, having planted the seed that, in Underwood’s hands, would grow into a global movement.

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For a chunk of my early twenties, I couldn’t stop thinking about death. Hypochondria conjured three fatal conditions for me to live out before breakfast—heart failure, blood clots, brain tumors. I’d plunge a french press loaded with heaped tablespoons of turbocharged coffee and rabbit-hole down cancer forums and blogs and vlogs, tracing the symptoms of phantom diseases I swore writhed around in my body. Now, aged 27 and dosed up on 50mg of Sertraline, my chronic fear of dying has subdued. In fact, nowadays, thinking about my own death calms me down. When I’m lying in bed, mulling over an article that feels impossible to finish or the myriad of reasons why someone hasn’t answered my text, I think about my mortality: the fact that it is 100% certain that one day, I will die. It helps me zoom out and reframe my present to discern the things that really matter.

On a bright afternoon in June, I took the tube to Kentish Town Community Centre, a red-brick building nestled among North London’s leafy streets. Inside, a cluster of white-haired adults were sitting on folding chairs, sipping English Breakfast tea and sampling homemade butter cheese twists. The scene could have been mistaken for any number of community gatherings: a neighborhood board meeting, Alcoholics Anonymous, a bridge club. But the group had come together to talk about a very specific subject matter. “As a society, we manage [death] so badly,” said Robert MacGibbon, an 81-year-old retired GP who was hosting the meeting. “What this is about, for me, is getting people to think about how they would like to manage their death one day,” said MacGibbon, “and then try and avoid these awful things of people dying in ambulances; dying on stretchers in corridors.”

MacGibbon is tall, with remarkable posture, tufts of white hair, and kind, wise eyes. He launched this particular death cafe with the desire to create a space for people to discuss death in a building completely detached from religion (he previously volunteered at a death cafe that wasn’t religious, but was held in a chapel). His meetings, which take place every month, attract a range of visitors. Participants might be elderly parents who have been putting off a conversation with their children about their end-of-life care, or grown adults who have just lost a parent. Other participants are terminally ill or feel themselves edging towards the end of their lives. Sometimes they no longer fear death and want to talk about this newfound sensation. Is it normal that I am ready to die?

“Everybody has an expectation, including doctors, that people aren't going to die; they're going to get treatment for what they've got,” said MacGibbon. Every day, medical researchers churn out new drugs and technologies that prolong our lives—without giving much thought to what makes a life worth living. In the past 60 years, medicine has increased the average lifespan by around seven years, yet in the U.K., the most common place to die is in a hospital, often tangled up in tubes, attached to machines, under glaring bright lights. “In many cases,” observes the physician and writer Dhruv Khullar in The New Yorker, “we’re prolonging the time it takes to die.”

MacGibbon recalls a recent conversation with a consultant cardiologist who wanted to do work on his aortic valve after learning he sometimes got breathless walking up stairs. MacGibbon pushed back. He didn’t want treatment. “I can live with it,” he said. “I'm quite happy to go slowly.” Talking about the end of our lives allows us to find autonomy in an otherwise inevitable process. “Once people have been to [a death cafe],” said MacGibbon, “they realize that you're actually talking about how to live better and more happily.”

According to MacGibbon, practical conversations about the end of life are important no matter how old you are. “We don’t talk about the fact that we’re in a constant state of ongoing grief for, like, the moment that has passed,” Natasha Lyonne recently told The New York Times. The 45-year-old actress admitted to meticulously planning her own funeral, from Chloë Sevigny’s speech—ghostwritten by comedian John Mulaney—to a month of commemorative screenings at Film Forum.

Yet for many of us, thinking about the end of our lives makes us squeamish. Our brains short-circuit. While the majority of U.K. adults have preferences about the type of end-of-life care they would like to receive, only 14% have actually documented these wishes, according to Marie Curie Research Centre at Cardiff University. In 2023, fewer than half of U.K. adults even had a will. Meanwhile, entire industries have been created to distance ourselves from the dead and dying. We’ve erected hospices, invented funeral directors; coroners, embalmers, and undertakers to push death further to the peripheries of our lives. What would our worlds look like if we could talk about our death wishes as frankly as (some of us) talk about our sex lives? If we could decide when it was time to die and how we wanted to do it?

After the introduction, MacGibbon split everyone into groups of five or six to speak confidentially with no agenda. Strangers, some terminally ill, spoke to each other about the diagnoses that would ultimately kill them and what they wanted to happen to their bodies after they were gone. One man said he hated the idea of being buried and a woman suggested he come to a meet-up where they were discussing the administrative aspects of end-of-life planning. In all the years I’d obsessed over death, I’d never thought about my dead body. Death felt all-consuming and imminent, yet actually dying seemed lightyears away. It was still a myth, a metaphor, an abstraction.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Death is fixed and certain, and at the same time, shifting. Our experience of it is shaped by our social worlds. In Madagascar, for instance, the Merina tribe regularly exhumes the remains of their dead loved ones, peeling off their burial garments and rewrapping them in fresh silk shrouds. Meanwhile, in India, thousands of Hindus make pilgrimages to Varanasi in order to be cremated and scattered into the Ganges River, a ritual known as attaining Moksha (liberation from the cycle of rebirth).

For Gabrielle Gatto, challenging our own relationship with death can be spurred on by engaging with how other cultures and religions approach it—a daily experience, for Gatto, at The Green-Wood Cemetery. The graveyard might be filled with Chinese Americans honoring their ancestors by observing Qingming (Tomb Sweeping Day), and then days later, with Italians celebrating Easter Sunday. “Grief can be laughing hysterically and grief also could be sobbing in a friend's arms,” Gatto told me over Zoom, as she described the range of multicultural educational programs she’s launched at Green-Wood. “My number one thing is always: How can I get someone to have that moment where they go, ‘Oh, I never thought about it that way’?”

How we mourn, grieve and remember is largely influenced by how we conceive of death. Is it the end? Or a new beginning? “One of the things that you'll never see in Bangkok is a death cafe,” I was told by Dr. Jack Fong, a professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University who has written one of the only books on death cafes. Growing up in Thailand, where over 92% of the population is Buddhist, Fong would see Buddhist temples everywhere, enmeshed in the landscape of Thai life. Many incorporated dharmachakra—gold, wheel-like structures—symbolizing the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. “That is basically the foundation of how they process their day,” said Fong. “They see everything in this karmic cycle.”

Among the other ways religion has furnished ways to make sense of death was a book, hugely popular across Europe in the 15th century, called The Ars Moriendi. The “art of dying” provided practical guidance for friars to help people die well. But without the framework of faith, finding language to talk about the end of our lives can feel challenging.

According to Lori G. Beaman, a religious studies professor at the University of Ottawa, non-religious people may not believe in “heaven,” but they do conceive of some form of afterlife. In researching non-religious spaces like death cafes, Beaman observed the emergence of alternative “afterlife imaginaries”—participants who wanted to survive through their relationships with loved ones, for instance, or to be buried in the garden so that their body could decompose into the earth. “We need a new imaginary to provide end-of-life care for people who aren't religious,” she told me, “Our current end-of-life care doesn't address that.”

In death cafes now occurring from Argentina to Australia to Armenia, a basic framework is shared—meetings are free, confidential and, as much as possible, removed from ideology. But each has a different set of customs, depending on the location, culture and organizer of the cafe. At a death cafe in Ecuador, for instance, participants are invited to share their lunches with the group alongside cups of spiced tea. Meanwhile, in Korea, attendees read their own eulogies surrounded by memorial candles and photos of themselves, even climbing inside a closed coffin. Some death cafes cater to specific intersectional groups, like people with disabilities and chronic health conditions, or LGBTQ+ or BIPOC communities.

Examining a chart of where death cafes are now occurring—displayed as coffee cup pins over a world map on the death cafe site—suggests some striking patterns about where people are most desirous of alternate spaces to talk about death. There are over 9,422 death cafes in the U.S., for instance, and nine across the whole of India. Death cafes provide a way of forming community outside of the normative frameworks of family and religion, finding new language and metaphors to think through life and death.

“There's this incessant indoctrination of all peoples here and in much of the Western world to become consumers,” said Jack Fong. The booming cosmetic and anti-aging industries, and widespread belief that buying will assuage all anxieties and discomforts, instills us with a feeling of immortality. Contemplating our mortality, then, becomes a revolutionary act. It asks us to transcend our social stratosphere; to shift our attention away from the material things that capitalism wants us to pay attention to. “Who would you be if I stripped you of all of those labels?” Fong asked, “Where do you start again? And what would you use to rebuild yourself?”

There’s a Bhutanese saying that to be truly happy we should contemplate our deaths five times a day. An app, WeCroak, has even been developed on this basis—reminding users that they will die at five intervals throughout the day. How would you live if you sat deeply with the absolute certainty that, one day, you would no longer be? Where would you put your money? Your energy? Your time? “I don't think the Western society wants to teach us that,” he said. “Because if it did, we wouldn't buy our Rolexes, we wouldn't buy those Prada purses. We wouldn't buy a Ferrari or a Louis Vuiton.”

Jon Underwood, the founder of the death cafe movement, was a Buddhist—and that worldview shaped the course of his life. He believed in impermanence—the Buddhist concept of Anicca—the idea that nothing was forever and everything was subject to change. “Talking about death, for me at least, is the ultimate prioritization exercise,” Underwood said in a BBC interview in 2014. “You know you have a certain time left, and then the question is, ‘What is important for me to do in that time?’”

In 2017, Underwood died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage. He was 44. Friends and family recognized the “irony” of a man who had spent so much of his life encouraging others to make the most of every second, should die so unexpectedly, in middle age. “There is of course nothing to conclude from this,” wrote his sister, Jools Barsky, “Other than the fact that life is finite, none of us ever know how long we have and so we must live well.”

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It was just after 3 pm at Robert MacGibbon’s death cafe in Kentish Town. There were five minutes left of our breakout sessions and it was my turn to speak. I didn’t want to. It felt smug and silly to engage in intellectualized babble about mortality, especially when I was sitting next to others who had a handful of years left to live. So I muttered a few things about life and anxiety and then let my voice peter off, watching the tiny blue grains of sand in the five minute glass timer, running so fast I could barely see them.

I wasn’t quite at the point where the thought of actually dying didn’t scare me, but as I listened to people talk about the imminence of their deaths, frankly and (sometimes) without fear, I wondered what I would need to get there. What it would take to make death seem less daunting, so I might feel content about how I’d lived one day. “Time is running out,” said MacGibbon, looking at the blue sand, falling and fizzing into nothingness. “If we don't address it now, we're gonna miss the opportunity.” ♦