I’ve been to a death café

Curiosity, and an invitation from a lady called Jenny, prompted me to visit my first death café last week. I guess I have a very practical attitude to death, have marked in my diary the day I expect to die, and know that when I do, my body will be delivered to the Bodyworlds factory in Germany to be plastinated and become a teaching aid. So I went along expecting to hear a succession of grieving people saying how tough bereavement was.  

But I was pleasantly surprised. Over coffee and biscuits, we each had an opportunity to speak, and everybody had something interesting to say. Sure some talked about bereavement, but in a positive way, and how with time, they have found themselves able to rebuild their lives. Several had been on a café excursion to the local crematorium and one shared the startling fact that the mortuary at Ipswich hospital has capacity to store 200 corpses.

Of course today most die in hospital and so spend time in the hospital mortuary. Those George Ewart Evans write about, who lived in rural Suffolk in the late nineteenth century will usually have died at home, been laid out in the front room, and buried quite quickly, especially in the summer.

For my next book Down to Earth I both visited a crematorium and spent an afternoon talking with a retired gravedigger. Both were enlightening and both gave me an insight into the practicalities of dealing with death. I also interviewed someone whose job involves promoting water cremation, a process described in the press as ‘boil in the bag’, which rather makes light of a process as environmentally sound as cremation is not.

I’ll return to the Saxmundham death café, not to dwell on mortality, but to listen to what those who attend have to say about life.