While enjoying tea, coffee, and cake, 60 people gathered to talk about death. In the church basement at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, Jonathan Jong, an Anglican priest and scholar on death anxiety, led a “death café” that attracted participants from age 8 to 80. 

Jong has also run death cafes in people’s homes and even at a science and religion festival. “Death cafés are one way to reduce the taboo around talking about death simply by, well, organizing specific times and places to talk about death,” he said.

Since their founding by Jon Underwood in the UK in 2011, thousands of death café events have taken place in 90 countries. They usually don’t have a lot of structure, but Jong likes to provide some discussion framework for participants. For example: How do you want to be remembered? What do you fear about death? Do you think there is such a thing as a “good death?” What do you think happens to us after we die? Do you have a will or advance directive?

Just last year, a woman who attended with her husband stopped Jong on the street to tell him that her husband had since died.

For Jong, his interest in death is really an interest in discovering how to actually live. “To the extent that we deny—or perhaps even forget about—our mortality, we might also take life for granted, and others in our lives for granted,” he said. “That’s the thing I really care about.”

“Death cafés get part of the way there. But there are limits to thinking and talking, staying on the cognitive and linguistic registers,” he added.

Death cafes may be indicative of the taboo nature of talking about death publicly. In interviews with 49 organizers of death cafes, researchers heard hosts articulate a cultural avoidance of talking about death, the loss of traditional death practices, and the outsourcing of death to professionals. 

Death positivity and its limits

Though death cafés are the elements most often making headlines, they fit within the death positive movement, which posits that people don’t like to talk about death and thus aren’t prepared for what it looks like, and it aims to promote productive conversations about death. The movement is exemplified in popular author and mortician Caitlyn Doughty’s books on the morbid history of undertaking and global customs around care for dead bodies, and her founding of Order of the Good Death that imagines better ecological possibilities for corpses or related organizations, like Death Over Dinner that promote end of life planning.

Jong agrees that a death taboo is problematic, but he resists any impulse “to dismiss or deny the awfulness of death. It’s true, of course, that death is a natural aspect of life: but that certainly doesn’t make it benign,” he said. 

For Jong, creating a setting for such conversations may be a good beginning. But he feels that death is terrible, and perhaps anxiety is a reasonable emotion, too. “Some of my earliest memories about my own emotional life have to do with my worrying about the fact that my mother would die one day: that made me profoundly sad,” he said. Further, at 13, one of his best friends died of an asthma attack. “That was a stark reminder of the fragility of life, which I have never forgotten,” he said.

Jong thinks of death anxieties in two dimensions. “The first is whether the fear is about ourselves or others. The second is whether it is related to what happens before death or what happens after death. Most specific death-related fears and anxieties fit something along these two axes.”

Many people worry about their family members dying or about how our deaths might affect others dependent on us. Others worry about the dying process: Will it hurt? Will I be alone? Then, in many cultures, there’s a fear of the dead or a fear of judgement or punishment after death.

Making sense of death

During an undergraduate lecture on terror management theory, Jong was introduced to social anthropologist Ernest Becker, who theorized that the fear of death motivates us to form families, join social groups, and create art and even science. According to Becker, motivation to live comes from a confrontation with our own mortality—a fear of the unknown or even the end of life or existence. Dubbed “terror management theory, “it’s a very ambitious theory, and I’m not sure I believe it: but exposure to it as an undergraduate student was very inspiring,” he said.

As a person of faith, he was intrigued about whether death anxiety strengthened people’s religious beliefs. In his own research in multiple cultures, he found only weak evidence that it does. Additionally, self-reported familiarity with dying did not necessary indicate people were unafraid of death.

Death through the lens of ancient traditions

This is where Jong feels people need more than a death café. He notes that the cafés lack practices that prepare us for death. For the most part, they are cognitive events. To him, faith traditions contain practices that prepare us for death and life.

Within his faith of Christianity, he gave several examples of practices. “Baptism is a kind of drowning… The embodied symbolism of being plunged under the water as into a grave is powerful,” he said. When Christians gather and eat bread and drink wine symbolizing Christ’s death, it is both a death remembrance and a commitment to “living sacrificially, being willing to give up our own lives,” he said. 

There’s also Ash Wednesday—a day Christians put ashes on their forehead and are reminded that they are dust and will return to dust—and the Feast of All Souls’—a Roman Catholic holiday to remember and pray for the departed. 

In another ancient tradition, Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as The Buddha, lived an ascetic lifestyle in pursuit of enlightenment. He eventually concluded that ascetism is not an end in itself; instead, giving up worldly possessions is a way to learn how to live. Those who commit to a monastic lifestyle— renouncing family or material possessions or living without certain comforts—endeavor to remove attachment toward all that exists, including their own bodies, thus, in a way, preparing themselves for the end of their own existence.

Regardless of one’s faith perspective, the wisdom—says Jung—is that preparing for death should happen not only in old age but throughout our lives.