Coffee, Cake and Creativity: Designing and Doing Death Café Limerick

Death Café events, consisting of facilitated discussions on topics such as mortality, loss, grief, the afterlife, etc. are experiential activities that can enhance personal learning for those who participate. This paper offers reflections from the perspective of a Death Café host and professional educator. In particular, the reflections focus on the virtual Death Café Limerick events held in 2020 and how they might be viewed as vehicles for informal death education in the midst of a global pandemic. The Death Cafe social franchise movement stems from the work of Swiss sociologist and anthropologist Bernard Crettaz. Death Café Limerick, which caters to people in the greater Limerick area who wished to gather in person to discuss aspects of mortality, death and grief, first ran in November 2015 as a socially-engaged art event. This Café was structured carefully, based on models of social engagement that offered participants not only the chance to talk about death and eat cake (one of Crettaz’s requirements for a Death Cafe), but also the option to participate in separate parallel creative sessions to allow non-verbal communication of ideas, highlighting the theme of mortality with the intent of facilitating conversations about thanatology. Death Café Limerick events have continued over the last five years, taking place at various lives venues across the city, county and as far away as Dublin. However, since March 2020, COVID 19 prevented most social gatherings in Ireland and the rest of the world. Death Cafés moved to online Zoom gatherings, engaging in many of the same activities and discussions but using technology to create cohesion and connection. This shift required changes in design and facilitation of these groups in many ways: how participants interacted with each other, how technology enhanced or detracted from these interactions, how participants could be supported when discussing difficult topics, and even how they accessed and enjoyed the celebratory foods in their own homes (cakes, sweets, pastries, special coffees, etc.) that had previously been supplied by the hosts in a shared venue. This paper, based on practitioner reflections from one of the host/facilitators of Death Café Limerick, considers the benefits and challenges of moving this activity online. It also aims to position Death Café events, both virtual and in real life, on the spectrum across informal and formal death education.