D'ark Media

By Amanda Rey | D’ark Media

Somewhere in Northwest Arkansas, there are people spending their days helping families prepare for death, studying the customs that surround it, or wondering why we can discuss every detail of a funeral once somebody has died but get terribly uncomfortable when a living person wants to talk about their own. Reta and I would very much like to meet those people.

We’d also like to meet the people who saw the words Death Café on a flyer and wondered what in the hell we were inviting them to. In fact, we have opened all three of our gatherings with that very question: “What did you think this event was about when you heard ‘Death Café’?” It’s a good icebreaker, and I’m interested in what people expect from a conversation before it has even started.

The idea is simple enough. A Death Café brings people together over coffee, tea, and something to eat for an open conversation about death and dying. There is no lecture, no prescribed agenda, and no particular conclusion anybody is supposed to reach. It isn’t grief counseling, and nobody is there to sell you anything. You can talk, ask questions, or just listen. We spend an extraordinary amount of time planning for things that might happen to us, while treating the one thing that certainly will as an unsuitable topic for company.

Our first two gatherings took place at the West Fork Public Library. Three people attended the first. The second, held in a different building with less signage and public notice, drew one. Frankly, the turnout wasn’t a great mystery, but the smaller setting allowed for a more personal conversation. Then we took the café to Fenix Arts on Mount Sequoyah, where six people gathered during the gallery’s Haunted exhibition. The atmosphere felt completely different. As someone who is perpetually studying people, I found the change in setting almost as interesting as the subject we had come to discuss.

After the first café, I sat down with Reta for an interview. She admitted she had expected to spend a good deal of the evening coaxing people into talking. Instead, the conversation took care of itself. “I feel so relieved,” she told Casey and me afterward. She had gone in prepared to facilitate a roomful of silence and came out thinking about where the next gathering might happen, and who else she wanted to know.

What was said by the people attending belongs to them. That part is important. These are private conversations, not material for a documentary, a podcast, or an article about somebody else’s grief. What I can tell you is that we want to keep making space for them.

Reta is building Northwest Arkansas End-of-Life Services around the practical and personal work of helping people consider their wishes, understand their options, and have conversations with their families before those decisions become urgent. My path is different. Through D’ark Media, I’m interested in the stories people leave behind, the voices and photographs worth preserving, and the psychology, history, folklore, and rituals surrounding death. I’m pursuing my own studies in psychology and related fields. We have different professional destinations, but a great deal of common ground.

We are not claiming to have invented the Death Café, or even to be the first people to bring one to this corner of Arkansas. An archived event listing places a Death Café in Fayetteville in December 2014. Good. If people were having these conversations here more than a decade ago, I want to know who was involved and what else has been happening since. Perhaps there is already a community of death doulas, end-of-life planners, funeral professionals, grief workers, and researchers in Northwest Arkansas that we haven’t found yet. We would be delighted to enter it. If everyone has been working in their own little corner, maybe it is time we introduced ourselves.

We intend to host more Death Cafés in the near future, hopefully in a variety of spaces around the region. We’re also developing separate workshops and retreats where there will be room for presentations and deeper exploration of customs, traditions, folklore, history, death, dying, grief, and bereavement. Those educational events are their own undertaking; the cafés will remain informal, confidential conversations led by the people who attend.

And because I apparently needed another subject to become completely fascinated with, I’m starting a podcast called Southern Gothic Cafè: Death & Other Gossip. Yes, the name is hilariously long. I like it that way. I’m interested in the things people remember, the things they whisper, and the peculiar customs we carry from one generation to the next. If it’s as fascinating as the gossip at a Southern funeral, I’ll consider that a very respectable beginning. The podcast will be a separate, public conversation—not a recording of what anyone shares privately at a café.

So, Northwest Arkansas: if you’ve been curious about attending, follow our Death Café updates through D’ark Media. If you have a library, gallery, or community space that might welcome a gathering, we want to hear from you. And if you’re already working in end-of-life care, planning, education, or the study of death and its rituals, please introduce yourself. This isn’t a roll call of everyone Reta and I happen to know. We’re trying to find out who else is here.

About the Death Café movement: Death Café was founded by Jon Underwood based on the work of Bernard Crettaz. Lizzy Miles was the first person to offer Death Café in the United States. You can read about the movement and its principles at deathcafe.com.