The death cafe was something I had never heard of, nor thought about in my 20 years of living, and yet, death is something I knew about, both from my personal life, and from studying and viewing media. My group and I had answered a set of questions regarding death, and spoke about it not in personal and emotional ways, but in philosophical ways.
One question that stood out to me was the question of how death is represented in the media. The first thing I thought of was romanticized deaths on television, thinking particularly of films where a character’s death is central to the plot, and it is dramatic and nothing like what my personal experience with death has been. The one television show my group and I got to talking about, was Black Mirror, particularly the award-winning episode titled “San Junipero,” in which two older women who are dying in a hospital, one of which was able-bodied and the other disabled, hook themselves up to a virtual reality system that takes them to a fictional town where they can live and fall in love, with the disabled woman being able-bodied in her virtual reality. When they die, their subconscious will still be hooked up to the virtual reality, and it will be their ‘heaven,’ or any type of afterlife. This got me to think about how with the rise of technology, death and dying will perhaps become something entirely different; maybe it will not be tragic and sad. That episode, however, also got me to think about the reading “Troubling Signs,” which deals with disability in Hollywood. Why did the disabled woman, in her virtual reality, become able-bodied? What would change in the episode, had she still been disabled?
In our set of questions, there was a question that asked us how we are planning our death, to which we all uncomfortably answered we do not think about it. I then thought about “Black Queer Studies, Freedom, and Other Human Possibilities,” which discussed HIV/aids in the black and queer community. I thought about this because I wondered how someone affected by HIV/aids in a black queer community would answer that question. Would they be like my group, quickly wanting to move on from the question, and barely having answers, or would they have a plan? It also is worth thinking about, that if someone privileged was affected by the virus, I would not think they planned on dying, because of medical advances.
Overall, the death cafe was an interesting way of thinking about death in our society and culture, death/dying in the media, which at times can be portrayed very well, or it can be inaccurate and romanticized. Death is not something many like to discuss or think about, and yet, everybody experiences it, so it is important to represent it in the media in ways that viewers can connect to it, understand it, and perhaps find comfort in the fact that it is a part of everyone’s life.