Group meets to talk about facing the end

The monthly invitation to attend the Death Cafe is simply stated.

“Open, respectful discussion on all aspects of death and dying,” the invitation reads. “Tea, cookies served. All 18 and older welcome. Call Nancy Reece Jones …”

“The way I think of it, is it’s the old saloon concept, where people would just get together and have conversations,” Jones said. “Death happens to all of us. It’s all around and it’s part of the cycle of life, and we do a phenomenal job of denying it.”

The Whitefish club is not unique to Montana.

Death Cafe is defined as a social franchise, meaning those who accept the club’s guiding principles are part of an international conversation.

A London man named Jon Underwood had the idea of combining sweets with the reality of death in 2010. By 2012, he released a set of guiding principles to the online world.

To date, there have been 3,621 Death Cafes within 37 countries.

“He literally just wanted the opportunity for people to talk about death because it is such a taboo subject in our world, particularly our culture,” Jones said.

Since finding Death Cafe in 2013, Jones has guided conversations about death in a community hall on the outskirts of Whitefish with a small group of eight to 15 people.

“It’s very open, but there are stipulations. For starters, there has to be tea and cake,” Jones said. “It kind of operates in my mind sort of like an AA meeting. We start off by going around, introducing yourself, then I encourage people to say what’s on their mind in the last month about death and dying.”

Guidelines state the Death Cafe is a conversation with no intention of leading participants to any conclusion, product, course or action. It’s not a grief support group, though many of the members have lost someone close to them, or see their death approaching. There’s no interrupting.

It’s also not supposed to be morbid.

“It’s just to encourage people to talk about what’s going to happen to all of us. Because, as they say, the one thing you can’t survive is life,” Jones said.

Jones has been fascinated with death since her mother died of colon cancer in 1987. Jones was 33 at the time.

She and her parents never talked about how serious the illness was. But it eventually became an unspoken acceptance that her mom would die from the disease.

But through that time, Jones experienced how her mom lived, even through her death.

“We had a long process of saying goodbye. I just began reading a lot about death, transitioning to death,” Jones said. “I got to experience her, really, the sort of the elegance of her death even though she whittled away to absolutely nothing with the cancer.”

She watched her typically reserved mom greet each friend as a welcome guest, though she eventually couldn’t leave her bed. Her mom said thank you to the hospice workers, and her four children and husband who took turns caring for her. When a hospital bed arrived, her mom simply asked to have a view of the home garden.

The announcement of death came disguised in gifts, when Jones’ mom asked her four children to sort through her childhood story books and the family silver.

“We literally sat on the floor around her bed, we were in our 20s and 30s, and divided these things up,” Jones said. “And she was so happy with that.”

As a hospice volunteer for 11 years, Jones has seen moments similar to her final memories with her mom.

Jones wanted to have a place where it was the social norm to talk about her experiences with death — to talk about what she and others want out of their own inevitable experiences. The Death Cafe has become a place to share her thoughts on leaving the living.

“We talk about a good death in Death Cafe. What is a good death?” Jones said. “Everyone is different ... I want a time of peace, surrounded by the people I love, music thrown in there, animals and views of the outdoors. It’s gotten pretty simple.”

To learn more about the Death Cafe, go to http://deathcafe.com/deathcafe/3408/.

Reporter Katheryn Houghton may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at khoughton@dailyinterlake.com.