I Loved My Death Cafe
The Experience of One Elder Woman
I had never been to a Death Cafe before! My first Death Cafe event was at least half female, and at a Unitarian Universalist church. We sat at tables, except for me on Zoom. I was moved around. It was fun.
We each revealed parts of our feelings and thoughts about death and what we wanted for ourselves and our survivors — because many of us are planners. Most of us intended to plan for and execute our exit stage left and we had no interest in avoiding the subject as it applied to us. Helpfully, we had all assumed we would die, and it would be a key event in our lives and the lives of those we loved and knew. In plain words, the Cafe was about how our death mattered to us and those who survived us. For me, that meant planning around my actual amount of cognitive and motor capacity present, as well as my associated fiscal situation, all by coincident time — I do love numbers. Well, this meant that I would have to monitor my actual situation over time, and I was willing to only lose a certain amount of capacity before I chose to leave Earth. I was able to say I feared a quick illness that left me incapacitated, not dead. Incapacitance is not what I want for myself. I’ve seen it in grandparents and others and my answer is, ‘not for me’! Indeed, I recall that my healthcare practitioner agreed that living as an incapacitated person…
