This week’s Death Café was the second part of the three-part Artivism Lab Speaker Series. Death Cafés are group conversations about death guided by questions revolving around personal, cultural, political, or spiritualexperiences. While originally the death café sounded like something that would be very difficult for me to face, it actually ended up being a satisfying experience which opened my eyes to the way many others see the topic of death versus what I imagined to be the “norm”.
Eliza Chandler and Esther Ignani spoke of death relating to their article “Strange Beauty: Aesthetic Possibilities for Desiring Disability Into the Future”, which speaks more about the idea of death through the eyes of the disabled, with insight to the differences in the way death is accessed (or not) between able-bodied people and the disabled. The assertion that many people think that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a different one”, or suggesting that it is easier for an able-bodied person to imagine death than to imagine being disabled is an important thing to consider when observing or creating art that pertains to the topics of either disability or death.
From the experience of the Death Café, I’ve noticed that people who are roughly around my age (20) seem to have a different outlook on the topic of death versus generations before us like our parents and our grandparents, who see it with more of a religious and spiritual lens. From my point of view, death is a subject that I don’t like to talk about, while older generations seem to talk about it all the time. This is bothersome for me, as conversations typically arise around me which prompt me to either zone out by focusing on something else or even just leaving the room.
This stigma around the topic of death seems to be common in my own age group, although something about the Death Café did allow each of us to open up a little bit and speak freely about our thoughts. Since nobody was being pressured into answering the questions or speak about their personal experiences, there was a very relaxed and casual feel to the conversation that allowed us all to give our own insight to the topic.
Through our conversations, we came up with a rough observation that while it is difficult to talk about when or how we will die, we can easily talk about what we think happens after death and how we can interpret the deaths of those we know versus how we interpret the deaths of strangers. Answers to questions like “what do you think happens after you die?” or “when did you become first aware of the realities of death?” help open a window into a persons cultural background and give some insight into how the topic makes others feel, thus influencing how we think that we should feel.
Chandler, Eliza & Ignani, Esther, “Strange Beauty: Aesthetic Possibilities for Desiring Disability Into the Future” (unpublished)