Last orders at the Death Café

The coffee and walnut cake was excellent. As was the chocolate cake, and the tea and biscuits. The conversation was wonderful too. We talked about death.

We were here, we dozen or so people in a meeting room in a small Suffolk market town on a sunny June evening, to do something British people never do: hold a conversation about the fact that we will all, in the end, die. Weather, football, the state of Kerry Katona’s finances — all these are acceptable topics for discourse. Death, on the other hand: not likely. There must be a subconscious fascination with the subject: otherwise why would Midsomer Murders get so many viewers? Yet no one discusses it openly. A new movement called Death Café has been established to challenge this. Starting in Switzerland, where the gatherings were called ‘café mortels’, the idea has now spread to France, Britain, the US, Canada and elsewhere. Anyone can hold a meeting. You just need a room, some cake and a bit of frankness.

It could sound like the sort of thing indulged in by American teenagers in black T-shirts getting all Kurt Cobain on each other. But the group I attended was resolutely un-grungy. Most of us were on the back nine of life, no one was weird, we all just wanted to talk. Even the woman in her fifties who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness spoke calmly and rationally, and while of course we all expressed our sympathy, there were no great displays of emotion. She discussed the practicalities, such as deciding who will get which piece of jewellery, as well as telling her husband she wants him to enjoy life after she’s dead: ‘Don’t feel guilty about finding someone else.’