There were 64 people, sitting at eight round tables in groups of eight deep in conversation at the Second Congregational Church in Greenfield this past Monday. They had responded to an invitation from the Interfaith Council of Franklin County to participate in a Death Café. And talk about … dying.

All the things that can separate us from each other — from skin color to polar opposite political beliefs — were absent in the presence of the one thing that cannot be denied by anyone; that one day we will cease living. This unavoidable reality connected the people sitting around each table, most of them meeting their tablemates for the first time.

The New York Times on June 16, ten years ago, described Death Café as “Part dorm room chat session, part group therapy. Death Cafes are styled as intellectual salons, but in practice they tend to wind up being something slightly different — call it cafe society in the age of the meetup.”

I did not experience what my seven tablemates had to say as being in an “intellectual” salon. We were sitting together for different, but unifying reasons. Yes, some people said they were there out of “curiosity,” and I suppose that’s an intellectual pursuit. But three of my tablemates had survived serious car accidents bringing them to the “edge.” Others were in the sway of having lost someone dear to them. One person had spent years learning about death and dying by studying with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Kubler-Ross was the Swiss American psychiatrist and pioneer of studies on dying people, who wrote “On Death and Dying.” In her seminal 1969 book, Kubler-Ross proposed the patient-focused, death-adjustment pattern, labeled the “Five Stages of Grief,” as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I have found that when people sit down to talk about death, pretense quickly falls away; they talk very openly and authentically. And say things in front of strangers which are really profound … and beautiful.

I was at table number five for my own reasons. One of them I wrote about briefly in my March 18 column “Connecting the Dots. “I’ve just returned home,” I wrote, “from a week at MGH Cooley Dickinson Hospital on the edge … living through a time of not knowing while receiving five blood transfusions and a lot of medical interventions. I became intimately aware of my body’s growing familiarity with what I had always known intellectually — that one day I would die.”

I was, blessedly, in a single room where I did not have to listen to the damn TV. What I kept looking at on the wall opposite me was the typical white board where the medical staff’s names were listed. On the bottom of my whiteboard were four questions which prompted lots of contemplation. However, I didn’t have an answer to fourth question. The questions (in caps) and my answers were:

PATIENT GOAL FOR THE DAY: Wake up tomorrow.

PLAN FOR THE DAY: Do not project.

ACTIVITY LEVEL: Go with the flow.

WHAT MATTERS MOST: To be determined.

The purpose of the brief description of my $40,000 week at Cooley Dickinson was to urge my readers to attend the then upcoming public concert by Eventide Singers, the hospice choir that retired Episcopal priest Mary Schreiber and I founded in 2007. Witnessing the dying of a dear friend who had started a hospice choir in Marshfield, Vermont, with her singers surrounding her in song was the springboard into why I felt so strongly about the need for a hospice choir in Franklin County. And the reason Eventide exists today. To provide a bed of harmony on which a dying person can be transported into what comes next.

“What comes next” is one of the many questions that can be discussed at a Death Café gathering. In my experience as a hospice volunteer since 2007, I have been graced by being permitted to companion people whose time is ebbing. At age 87, I am now in that same timeframe. I am gifted by others in my timeframe who have been meeting for years in a monthly gathering entitled “Living Fully, Aging Gracefully, Befriending Death.” It’s a refuge from the din of the distracting world “out there,” a time and place where I am deeply heard. Being “heard” is an affirmation.

Which is why I am grateful that Death Café has come to Franklin County. I will go to the next gathering on Monday, May 8 to meet and talk with other questioners about what comes next.

“Connecting the Dots” is a bi-weekly attempt to find clarity in all the seemingly random elements that are the world we find ourselves living in. John Bos is a contributing writer for Green Energy Times. He is the project director for a volume of 50 poems and images entitled “Words to Live By” created with three other cancer survivors. As always, comments and questions are welcome at john01370@gmail.com.

]]>