A friend and I went to our first Death Cafe in Summerside yesterday. I was already planning to be in town for an appointment and was able to arrange to stay a bit longer to join her, and I’m so glad I did. She and I are both very open about talking about death, so she was the perfect partner for this experience.

The Death Cafe concept started in the UK just over a decade ago and are now held around the world. They are designed to be casual events where people talk about death: your own, those you love, death in general. It is emphasized that a Death Cafe is not a grief support group, though most everyone yesterday spoke about people they loved who had died.

Hospice PEI were the sponsors and had held a few before the pandemic, but this was the first post-pandemic edition. Their staff arranged all the logistics (including chocolate cupcakes with little RIP signs on them!) and acted as facilitators. I think there were about 15 of us around three tables at Samuel’s Coffee House.

There aren’t firm rules around what is discussed at a Death Cafe, except that we not share the stories or details we heard from others. It was made clear we could speak or just listen, whatever we were comfortable doing.

After introductions, the facilitator at our table of six invited us to share what we hoped to get out of the session or what had made us attend. We all had very different reasons for being there, and the conversation flowed freely. We also used cards from The Death Deck Game, and spent an hour talking and listening. Despite the serious topic, the room was filled with laughter, but there were naturally also a few tears.

My mother is 100. She is remarkably well for her age, but is ready to die, and we talk about it often. She tells others her hope that she won’t wake up one morning, getting the death she prays for, and the reactions are mixed, of course, depending on her audience. When she started speaking so openly about this a couple of years ago, I gently suggested others might not be comfortable with it, but she continued anyway and I accepted it. Death is a very real part of her life, our lives.

My mother is a devout Christian, as was my father, and so I attended church basically from birth. Most Christian churches on PEI have a graveyard attached, and our church’s graveyard is the final resting place of many of my ancestors. I could pick out their tombstones before I could read them, would help my mother as she tended the flowers lovingly placed in front of them each spring, knew how to clean the stones with a stiff bristle brush and soapy water.

My great grandparents were the rough-surfaced white stone onto which moss stubbornly clung. We would scrub their names and dates and the simple phrase God is Love, which is also on the tombstone now in place at my father’s head, where my mother will be, where I will be.

One uncle and aunt had a polished red stone that was easy to clean, with a small tombstone next to it for the tiny baby they had who died right after he was born. That one had a little lamb sitting on top and was my favourite for that reason, but it was so sad, the little baby that never was guarded by the hard, staring lamb.

When you walk by a graveyard on your way in and out of church at least once a week, play tag and run around the tombstones when adults aren’t there to tell you to simmer down, you get a pretty good idea from a young age what life will eventually lead to. Someday it will be you in the box that is carefully carried into the church, the pump organ wheezing Abide With Me. Another little child will awkwardly carry a smelly flower arrangement and have to stand by your grave looking solemn, as you did so many times in the cold or with mosquitos biting your ankles. There will be sandwiches and tea after, and quiet words about you.

My mother taught me an old prayer to say at bedtime that she must have learned from her grandmother, who learned from her mother, and back and back:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take

I would then say God bless Mommy and Daddy, and recite a long list of aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and pets, including my goldfish, Henry. It was never actually the same list twice as it depended on how tired I was or who was front of mind.

Amen.

And to this day, many decades after I left behind the church and the ideas underlying that fairly creepy verse, the prayer occasionally comes back to me when I can’t sleep. I don’t say the prayer, but list off the loved ones, long-gones and still-heres, all the cats, a few chickens, and drift off.

We had family wakes in our house when I was a small child, the traditional way it had always been done. Only a wall separated two-year-old me in my crib from the dead body of my grandmother and then, a few months later, an 18-year-old cousin. They were asleep while we were asleep, they were asleep when we were awake. We waked, they slept.

Someone even took group photos next to the caskets, capturing those final moments together. That’s something I’ve never heard of anyone else doing, and which I knew from a young age was probably totally bonkers and something best kept to myself, but that’s what happened. People touched the dead hands and faces. I don’t remember any of this happening, except that I’ve seen those photos, rushing quickly past them in the photo albums. The smell of flowers must have been overwhelming in our house, and the scent of too many roses can still make me queasy.

I’m not sure if many people cried at my grandmother’s wake as she was 74 and hadn’t been well, so it would be seen as a blessing. I know many cried at my cousin’s wake because he had been killed in a motorcycle accident and was beloved by everyone. Only last week, my mother told me again that she never really got over his death, and that her life was completely changed by it. She lost her mother when she was 4, her only brother when she was 37, her father the year after I was born, her grandparents who raised her, but her young nephew being killed by a careless driver was the death that cut her life in half, the before and after.

When someone who volunteered at the charity where I worked in Toronto died, many of our staff and volunteers went to the wake and funeral. I was then in my early thirties. A colleague asked me to pick her up to go to the funeral home, and when she got in the car told me she was nervous as she had never been to a wake before and wasn’t sure what she would have to do. I was surprised she had lived into her mid-50s without attending a wake, even a family wake, but kept that to myself and told her to just follow me.

As it turned out, I was unable to model the standard PEI wake behaviour – shake hands, tell the person how sorry you are for their loss, shuffle along to the next person, shake hands, tell the person how sorry you are for their loss, shuffle along to the next person – because this volunteer had no family. None. We found out that night in the most poignant way possible that we were her family. Social services paid for the funeral, and it was pretty grim: a flimsy blue cardboard casket, only the flowers our charity had sent, no receiving line, a minister who had never met her and didn’t seem to want to be there. I, confident waker that I was, had never seen anything like it, so my coworker and I both experienced something new that evening.

That same work colleague died last week. She had been unwell for a while, but it was still a sad message to receive. After hearing the news of her death, I remembered a story she had told me about her own mother’s death.

Her mother was in the hospital and had been unresponsive for a couple of days, her breathing slowing, life draining away. Doctors said it wouldn’t be long, and my friend sat alone by her side, hour by hour, no partner or sibling to relieve her as it was just the two of them living together in Canada. Their relationship had been difficult for many complex reasons, but she was still feeling very sad that this was the end of her mother’s life.

Suddenly, her mother roused, sat up, looked at my friend and said, “You and I have a lot to talk about.” Then her mother laid back down and died.

The end. Amen.

They are planning to hold more Death Cafes on PEI, and they are also held in many places around the world. It was an entirely positive experience, very freeing and uplifting, and I hope to attend another one some time. My friend and I agreed that talking about death made us feel very alive.