Harmony Springs will be hosting our first death cafe at Giant Eagle Market District located at 1700 Corporate Woods Parkway Uniontown, OH 44685 from 7-8:30 PM on Wednesday, February 1, 2017. The Death Cafe Session will take place on the second floor of the cafe. Cake (a death cafe thing) and light refreshments will be provided.
The Death Café is a discussion group about death and our (finite) lives. The goal of the café is to increase awareness of death with the view of helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.
The Death Café meetings are confidential and not-for-profit. Our guiding principles are that participants respect one another's beliefs and avoid trying to change others' viewpoints. The Death Café is not a bereavement or grief support group or end-of-life planning session. It’s all about an interesting, unstructured conversation – open and free-flowing with no specific agenda.
The Death Cafe' is an international group (over 2,000 cafes across the world). The Death Cafe concept was started in the United Kingdom by Jon Underwood. He was influenced by the ideas of Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, who started holding Cafe Mortel events in France and Switzerland. At these events, people come together in a relaxed, confidential and safe setting to discuss death, drink tea (or your favorite beverage) and eat delicious cake or cookies. Gail Rubin interviewed Jon Underwood, founder of the Death Cafe, and Lizzy Miles, who held the first Death Cafe in the U.S. in Columbus, Ohio. Gail Rubin hosted this pioneering event in September of 2012.
To get you better acquainted with the Death Cafe concept, visit DeathCafe.com. The Green Death Cafe sessions are sponsored and promoted by Harmony Springs Church of Green. Harmony Springs is a radically welcoming progressive spiritual community that affirms every individual no matter their faith or no faith at all.
Visit https://www.meetup.com/Green-Death-Cafe/ to read more about the Green death cafe. Visit www.harmonysprings.org for more information about the sponsors Harmony Springs Christian Church.
Numerous articles have been written about the Death Cafe model and its local gatherings:
The New York Times The New Old Age Blog: Death Be Not Decaffeinated
The Boston Globe: Talk about death, hold the sugar
National Public Radio, NPR.org: Death Cafes Breathe Life Into Conversations About Dying
The Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio): Facing death, over tea and cake