Aurora library to host its first Death Café

Mortality will be on the menu at Aurora's Santori Public Library Thursday, July 27. The library will host a "Death Café," an opportunity for people to come together and discuss death while sipping tea and eating cake. It begins at 5:30 p.m.

Two grief and loss professionals will facilitate the discussion. Lynne Staley has been a companion to grievers for 15 years. She is a certified grief recovery specialist facilitating the Grief Recovery Outreach Program at RUAH Center, a wellness community in Naperville. She is the curator of Life After Loss Coach on Facebook.

Cindy Thelen, LCPC, CT, is an Oak Brook psychotherapist specializing in grief, loss and life transition therapy. Her focus is on helping people discover resilience, hope, meaning, and ways to cope and manage when their world has changed.

Staley learned to facilitate a Death Café through a webinar hosted by the Association for Death Education and Counseling and then hosted one at the RUAH Center in January.

"I experienced a profound loss that made me become a student of the subjects of grief and loss, and I became acutely aware of how challenging this subject is for people," Staley said.

"When I heard about this open-ended invitation about what many consider to be a taboo topic, I thought it was brilliant."

Staley said Death Cafés are brilliant in their simplicity. "People walk through the door with whatever is on their mind. It might be grief, their own loss, an experience at a deathbed, or their struggle with their own mortality or mortality in their world. We just ask the question, 'What brought you here today?' It fascinates me."

Thelen helped facilitate the Death Café at the RUAH Center.

"The experience for me was rich," she said. "I had been reading about it for a long time, and it was similar to what I imagined it would be. It was rich because, for some people, this is a topic they don't want to talk about - especially at parties and other social events. Sometimes the topic will come up and someone will say, 'Oh, that's so morbid. Let's not talk about it.' So where and when do you talk about it?

"Certainly, in my work, I do a fair amount of grief counseling. The person or a loved one has received a diagnosis. Death is right here, and who do they talk to about it?"

But what's with the cake?

"That's the playful piece of it," Staley said. "I think it's a reflection of how talking about death should be part of life. To gather over a bit of a treat and tea may have been founder Jon Underwood's way of saying, 'Let's make this part of our life.' It symbolizes that death is not darkness, necessarily."

Staley added that although grief professionals will help facilitate the gathering, there is no agenda.

"We're not here to define what death means for people or what happens after death or any related topic. It's really up to the participants to guide one another. The only facilitation is that everybody who wants to speak gets a chance to speak."

Thelen said death is one of the "basic existential kind of fears.

"We know in our heads we're all going to die and everyone we know is going to die, and a lot of people have died that we know. Yet, still, death is the great unknown. There's no, 'OK, here's what I can expect.' So there is fear of the unknown and perhaps fear of the dying process."

But the conversation does not have to be morbid, she added. "It's more of an opportunity to chat. To throw ideas out."

There is no registration or charge for the July 27 event, which takes place in rooms 125 and 126 in the Richard and Gina Santori Library at 101 S. River St. in Aurora. The Death Café begins at 5:30 p.m. and will wrap up by 7:30 p.m.

Note: Death Café Founder Jon Underwood died suddenly from undiagnosed leukemia on June 27, 2017. He was 44. Underwood held the very first Death Cafés in the basement of his home in east London in September 2011. More than 4,000 Death Cafés have been held in 51 countries since then.