‘A ghost that lives with us’: Death Cafes take the sting out of the inevitable end

Death can be a heavy subject, but there's typically a lot of laughter at the Death Cafe meetings at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. (Brook Joyner/CNN via CNN Newsource)

ATLANTA, Georgia — After a potluck supper, a short guided meditation and a quick lesson in resistance singing, a couple dozen people made their way to a quiet room at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. As a choir warmed up downstairs, they gathered – some strangers, some friends - to discuss a topic that’s normally off-limits: death.

“I have had a lot of interaction and contact with death in my adult life. And there are not really many places where I feel comfortable talking about any of that,” one woman dressed in black, who asked CNN not to publish her name, told the group. “Oftentimes, if I have a friend or someone over for coffee and I bring death up, they’ll take the subject off someplace else so that it’s happier.”

“I don’t really regard death as an unhappy topic,” she said, prompting several nods from the group. “It’s just, you know, I find it a necessary conversation.”

This “necessary conversation” didn’t happen among funeral directors or grief counselors. This group – which included women with graying hair and comfortable OnCloud running shoes, a doctoral student scribbling in a tiny notebook and men wearing office casual chinos – were talking death over tea and vegan strawberry cookies in a gathering commonly called a Death Cafe.

Death Cafes are popping up in churches, coffee shops and even historic cemeteries across the country.

Often advertised on Facebook or through other social media, the free meetings are open to everyone and focus on informal, unstructured conversation about mortality.

For such a weighty topic, laughter often punctuated the wide-ranging conversations at the two Death Cafes I visited in Atlanta. People leaned in and listened intently as others spoke with sincerity.

Topics varied, and so did opinions, but all comments were welcome.

Some admitted to feeling denial that their death would come. Some didn’t even like to say the word “death.”

Still others said they envied people who had a belief system that guaranteed life after death. One woman leaned on her walker as she spoke warmly but quietly, saying it didn’t matter what happened next.

“I mean, we’re living things, and living things take their time as they go away to dust,” Marycallie Laxton said. “I don’t know what happens to our spirit, our energy. We are electric beings. So, does the light just turn off?

“I don’t care,” she answered her own question with a laugh. “I don’t care.”

Some attendees discussed harrowing near-death experiences and how motivated they felt afterward to live life with more vigor. And in what may be a sign of the times, more than one person talked about being terrified as they witnessed a shooting.

“It was so close – it had to be no more than 100 yards – and people started stampeding and running. It was one of the scariest moments of my life, and I remember thinking, ‘why? How come that doesn’t hit me?’ ” said Rosemary Kimble, a Death Cafe host.

Some conversations took a more esoteric turn. Many mentioned being with dying parents or siblings who started talking to people who weren’t there. Several said their loved ones saw long-dead parents or friends who seemed ready to welcome them.

“It’s different every time,” said Kimble, a soft-spoken death doula, also known as an end-of-life doula. Death doulas provide holistic, emotional and sometimes spiritual support to people and their families during the dying process. “With death, there’s an awful lot to discuss.”

‘A non-destructive ghost’

Researchers credit Swiss sociologist and ethnologist Bernard Crettaz with organizing the first Deadly Cafe, or Cafe Mortels, in 2004.

Crettaz is said to have described death as “a scandal, a ghost that lives with us.” Though it’s an inevitable part of life, people’s fear of death often led them to avoid talking about it. So he created a safe space to gather and have casual conversations about death, essentially addressing the ghost in the room and making it “a non-destructive ghost.” He believed that such conversations would also lead to bigger truths about life.

After reading about Crettaz’s cafes, in 2011, former government employee Jon Underwood held one at his home in Hackney, England, and created a website with advice so others could stage their own. A 2025 post on the site says there had been more than 20,000 Death Cafes in 93 countries.

In past centuries, even in Western cultures, religion often helped people better navigate the death experience, said Dr. Anisah Bagasra, who runs the Death, Dying & Bereavement Research Lab at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

When it was more common to die at home and family cared for the body themselves – sometimes even laying out their loved one in the front parlor for a funeral – there was a better understanding of what happened with death, Bagasra said.

With an increasingly secular culture in the US and the growth of the funeral, hospital and nursing home industries, death became a more removed experience, she said. People fear what they don’t know or haven’t experienced, making even simple conversations about the topic deeply uncomfortable.

“In the United States, we’re generally a death-anxious, youth-centric focused culture,” Bagasra said. “Other cultures and religious traditions where people die at home and where everybody’s involved in the funeral and burial process have a lot lower rates of death anxiety.”

Normalizing mortality with Death Cafes can ease anxiety, research shows. Cafes can also create a supportive community, generate compassion and enhance emotional resilience.

At the two cafes I visited in Atlanta, Kimble opened the meetings letting people know that this was not a grief counseling session, rather it was a discussion where all topics about death were welcome. She explained there is one simple ground rule: Everyone should get a turn to speak before speaking a second time, “because once we get going, people get really enthusiastic about this conversation.” Then she mostly sat back, listened with empathy and asked questions only during lulls in the conversation, which were few.

“I don’t lead the conversation. We never have like a speaker or a specific topic,” she told the group. “We can talk about end of life or final disposition, or movies or whatever comes up.”

Making space for conversations

Barbara Dale, 75, said she attended a cafe in March mainly out of curiosity.

“Death is getting closer for me, so it’s something that I’m trying to embrace,” she said.

Death talk comes easy for her, Dale told the group. She’s been around it in her years as a social worker, and in fact, talking about death changed the trajectory of her career. While in nursing school, she angered a professor who told her to quickly check a patient’s IV. She came back an hour later; the patient wanted to talk through his impending death, and she wanted to listen.

“I constantly was getting in trouble because all these people on this floor were dying and they really wanted to come to grips with it,” Dale remembered. “I was trying to help them and talk with them about it.”

Learning about her aptitude for difficult conversations, a counselor directed her toward social work instead. Late in her career, Dale even wound up supervising hospice workers.

Despite her comfort with discussion of death, she said, talking about it in a Death Cafe felt special.

“There’s something about being in a room of your peers talking about death issues,” Dale said, and young and old alike could benefit from the experience.

“It’s important to know what you want at the end of your life,” she said.

Taylor Borgelt has attended several Death Cafes as she finishes the research for her Ph.D. in the Purdue University anthropology department. Her work is focused on cultural death care in the American South.

Every Death Cafe she’s visited has been uniquely interesting, Borgelt said.

“They serve different people differently,” she said. With a younger crowd, the talk feels more speculative – “maybe because, for them, death feels less tangible.”

With older crowds, conversations tend to be more practical.

Regardless of age, Borgelt said, her research has shown that “with the social taboo around death, it’s important to make space for these conversations.”

Barbara Begner, 72, said she liked the Death Cafe experience so much that she plans to put one together for the senior ministry program she runs at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta.

“The cafe’s really powerful, and it would be a good experience for the elder population to think ahead toward what kind of service they would like and several other prompts I’ll create,” she said.

Begner said it “blows me away” how many of her older friends haven’t made plans for the end. One friend has a mom who’s 90, and they’ve never discussed what she wants for her death.

“You hear people have talking about having to take someone off a ventilator. What a heavy decision that is, especially if you haven’t had those conversations with loved ones about what they want beforehand,” Begner said.

Begner told the group that when she dies, she wants six days of music. Some attendees laughed, but she said she was serious.

“I think it needs to be a celebration at the end,” she said. “OK, maybe I wouldn’t hold them to six, but why not?”

‘What did I do to deserve this life?’

At a cafe in April, the group acknowledged that death discussions don’t always lead to answers, but that’s OK, too.

Bill Bozarth, 83, said he runs a website for his high school classmates that requires him to continuously update an In Memoriam section. His class of 1960 has lost about 150 members so far.

“I look through those yearbook images and click the obituary links every time I rearrange them. It’s kind of morbid, but on the other hand, it really connects me, and it makes me think,” Bozarth told the group.

The first classmate to die was in 1959, before they even graduated.

“And here I am alive in 2026. What did I do to deserve this life, to draw the good cards out of the deck?” he asked.

Kimble, the death doula, said that not knowing exactly what topic will come up at a Death Cafe is what makes the experience beautiful.

“It’s always interesting,” she said. “And it’s good for people to realize, talking about death certainly won’t kill you.”

Jen Christensen, CNN