Death at the café
Oct 27, 2010 7:33:37 GMT
Post by Deleted on Oct 27, 2010 7:33:37 GMT
There was an interesting article in today’s paper about organizing “cafés mortels” – two hour discussions in cafés, where people talk about death. It’s a subject of preoccupation for lots of people, but one rarely finds an appropriate occasion to discuss some of the more slippery points. People talk about their own death, the death of others, deaths you fear and deaths you wish for, deaths for which your mourning has never ended.
These discussions are a Swiss invention – Bernard Crettaz, a sociologist and anthropologist, found that people needed to get back to older traditions of facing death. People used to get together for long wakes to honor the departed and talk about their life and death, who might be next and who didn’t care. In modern times, death is swept under the rug as quickly as possible, and one’s thoughts about death get locked in with no possibility of release. People get vicarious thrills out of celebrity deaths like Diana Spencer or Michael Jackson, but the ones that really matter to them become taboo.
Anyway, the article describes a discussion that was organized recently in Paris, and it sounded pretty interesting. The first person to speak said “I had to announce to my wife, when we were both very young, the death of her mother.” They had had a big fight, and his wife had gone out all night. Her father called when she was out. When she returned at dawn, her husband told her that her mother had committed suicide. The man said that he had felt guilty from that day onward, as the bearer of bad tidings, like in antiquity, someone to be killed.
The next speaker said he had had an opposite experience – the person who announced a death to him became a close friend.
Apparently these gatherings run from a crowd of 20 to up to 300 participants, depending on the venue. Bernard Crettaz naturally says that he has heard it all, from the tragic to the hilarious, but it is never a boring subject.
Guilt is the most common feeling. One of the participants works at the Père Lachaise crematorium and helps families to organize their ceremonies, but she never gets to talk about her own grief. She was taking care of her dying sister. One day, she decided that she absolutely had to get out and take a break, so she went to lunch with a friend. Naturally her sister died while she was out.
It takes a while for people to get to the next stage of death in these discussions. Finally, a woman in her sixties threw the fly in the soup. Her parents are 93 and 96 years old and both suffer from Alzheimer’s. “I want them to die. They don’t recognize each other and they don’t recognize me. All I can do is give them raspberries. And I have to give them with a spoon, because if I give it with my hand, they push me away.”
Sounds like these discussions can get pretty gripping. The evening is generally brought to an end by the organizer getting people to talk about their own death – how they see it, if they fear it, how they think the people close to them will react.
It’s true that it is not easy for most people to talk about death.
These discussions are a Swiss invention – Bernard Crettaz, a sociologist and anthropologist, found that people needed to get back to older traditions of facing death. People used to get together for long wakes to honor the departed and talk about their life and death, who might be next and who didn’t care. In modern times, death is swept under the rug as quickly as possible, and one’s thoughts about death get locked in with no possibility of release. People get vicarious thrills out of celebrity deaths like Diana Spencer or Michael Jackson, but the ones that really matter to them become taboo.
Anyway, the article describes a discussion that was organized recently in Paris, and it sounded pretty interesting. The first person to speak said “I had to announce to my wife, when we were both very young, the death of her mother.” They had had a big fight, and his wife had gone out all night. Her father called when she was out. When she returned at dawn, her husband told her that her mother had committed suicide. The man said that he had felt guilty from that day onward, as the bearer of bad tidings, like in antiquity, someone to be killed.
The next speaker said he had had an opposite experience – the person who announced a death to him became a close friend.
Apparently these gatherings run from a crowd of 20 to up to 300 participants, depending on the venue. Bernard Crettaz naturally says that he has heard it all, from the tragic to the hilarious, but it is never a boring subject.
Guilt is the most common feeling. One of the participants works at the Père Lachaise crematorium and helps families to organize their ceremonies, but she never gets to talk about her own grief. She was taking care of her dying sister. One day, she decided that she absolutely had to get out and take a break, so she went to lunch with a friend. Naturally her sister died while she was out.
It takes a while for people to get to the next stage of death in these discussions. Finally, a woman in her sixties threw the fly in the soup. Her parents are 93 and 96 years old and both suffer from Alzheimer’s. “I want them to die. They don’t recognize each other and they don’t recognize me. All I can do is give them raspberries. And I have to give them with a spoon, because if I give it with my hand, they push me away.”
Sounds like these discussions can get pretty gripping. The evening is generally brought to an end by the organizer getting people to talk about their own death – how they see it, if they fear it, how they think the people close to them will react.
It’s true that it is not easy for most people to talk about death.