Bakerview Community Crematorium will host a Death Café on October 16th from 2-3 p.m.
Death can be a taboo subject in many situations.
But the Bakerview Community Crematorium and Celebration Center in Mission provides a safe space for people to come together and discuss a variety of topics about life, death, and dying.
Baker View will host its first-ever Death Cafe on October 16th from 2pm to 3:30pm The idea for a Death Cafe was born in Switzerland and has since spread.
“This is a worldwide movement and a little bit new in our area, but we thought we’d bring it in,” Bakerview Funeral Director Rosemary Meyer said.
Meyer said the cafe is open to anything death-related people want to talk about. She says that could include anything from green burials to human composting, rituals surrounding death, or even her interesting book on the subject.
Meyer has attended Death Café several times before, but Anastasia Haley of Bakerview said this was her first time.
“When I joined the team, I was already following the movement of a lot of positive deaths, so I really supported that. So when you see that kind of built into the funeral home here, I [thought] It’s a great idea,” Haley said.
Meyer and Haley were inspired to organize the event after taking an end-of-life doula course to help people cope with the dying days.
“We help people after they die, but before they die we see that something is missing. So we took this course and then we learned what people think about death. That led to Death Café, which has an open theme of being able to say things,” Meyer said.
Bakerview hopes to host more Death Cafe events in the future if the community shows interest.
“This is going to be a very open discussion and we’re going to see what the community is interested in,” Meyer said. “Because we could actually have a theme or a guest speaker, but we want to open it up and see what people are interested in.”
In Haley’s experience, many people don’t like to think or talk about death. Bakerview wants to provide a safe place to talk about this subject without coming across as weird or morbid.
“People avoid us by saying, ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about that.’ That’s weird.’ It’s not pathological, but some people think it is,” Meyer said. .
“We talk about death in a positive light, like hospice and the care that people get. This is a topic that needs to be talked about, because at the end of life, if you’re sick and you end up in hospice, Because then you’re very afraid of what’s going on. But when you come to Death Café, you can talk about things like that.”
