On Tuesday (March 6), we attended the second event of the ARTivism Lab Speaker Series which was a Death Café. Prior to this experience, I vaguely knew about these types of social gatherings. I either came across it randomly in various articles/blog posts and it was also briefly shown in an episode of Long Island Medium. Regardless of my prior knowledge, I would have never seen myself at an event like this.
Death, for me, is a touchy subject. After losing my grandmother four years ago , and as of recently my grandfather, it’s a topic I tend to avoid. Not because I’m uncomfortable with talking about death, but because I associate death with my own personal and upsetting experiences. Anytime death would come up in a conversation, I immediately had the connotation to relate it to myself and what I experienced, which made me shut down all together.
It wasn’t until the Death Café that I realized I was more open with the topic of death than I thought. It is so much more than what we personally deal with. It involves many things such as discussing the experiences of passing that others may face, or what was mentioned in our class reading Strange beauty: Aesthetic possibilities for desiring disability into the future, people who may have a “greater access to death” (pg. 3). It can also delve into how people view the process of the after life and what we think is there for us.
You don’t realize how certain people, whether it’s because of their race or physical limitations, are seen to be associated with an ‘unliveable’ life. Listening to Dr. Eliza Chandler and Dr. Esther Ignani speak at the Death Café, in combination of internalizing certain parts of their article (mentioned above), it made me more aware of how often disability is “entangled with the representation of death” (Chandler, Death Café). They brought up topics I was even shocked to know about. One that especially stuck with me was when Ignani was discussing the “Why A Death Café in Disability Studies?” slide, people associated disability as a threat to future generations.
I think media is the main culprit behind people viewing disability as an unliveable way of life. It’s a combination of being an underexposed subject and not really discussed, or over-dramatized in movies like “Me Before You.” As someone participating in the Death Café was saying in regards to people viewing disability (especially deafness), if you limit what people with disabilities can have access to, then there is no way of the public knowing that “deaf is not death.”
As the series went on, I felt more comfortable with discussing death in such an open way. It was reassuring to know that you do not always have to participate and get personal about topics. Something else that is helpful is that every question is viewed extremely generically, so being personal doesn’t even have to be an option. It made me more interested in how to view death in the future and how to discuss it with other people. I want to, one day, delve further into all the unanswered questions we have about death and make it a more accessible conversation for everyone to talk about.
References
Chandler, Eliza & Ignani, Esther, “Strange Beauty: Aesthetic Possibilities for Desiring Disability Into the Future” (unpublished)