It was the day after The Spectator’s summer party and I was on my way to something called a death café. After an unknown quantity of Pol Roger the night before, I was already contemplating my own mortality. This death café was being held in a Gail’s in Horsham (after closing time, mercifully for its customers). The coffee tables were shoved awkwardly together in the middle of the shop floor. Eight of us, all women, sat: a healthcare worker, a retiree, a lawyer, two death doulas (we’ll get to them later) and me, at 26, three decades younger than anyone else present.
We were there because ‘death positivity’ is having a moment. There are death cafés, death doulas and funeral celebrants who’ll narrate your cremation like a wedding DJ. Advocates for death positivity say that we have become squeamish about the idea of dying and that the only way back to a ‘good death’ is to talk about it more.
A man in his twenties said he was so paralysed by ‘death anxiety’ it stopped him doing anything with his life
Death doulas – sometimes billed as ‘soul midwives’ – are the influencers in this world. They claim to offer emotional, practical and spiritual support in someone’s final months, sitting with the dying the way a birth doula sits with a woman in labour. Caroline Lucas, the former Green party leader, has trained as one. Davina McCall says she will get around to it when she retires. Nicole Kidman is in training following the death of her mother. One doula organisation credits the ‘Kidman effect’ for increased interest.
It is an entirely unregulated trade. Anyone can call themselves a death doula. The courses on offer, in person or online, require no clinical training or bedside practice. One doula tells me new training providers keep popping up: ‘It is a bit of a race to the bottom, with some saying they can train people in a day.’ Others require 18 months. Some doulas charge upwards of £50 an hour; others offer their services for free – perhaps that is stranger.
Stranger still are the biographies on doula directories that read like dating app profiles. One doula is ‘particularly interested in working with people from BDSM communities’. Perhaps their kink is death. Do they put a ball gag in at the final breath, or offer a latex death mask? There is also a Trans Death Café and a Queer Death Network (no, not some Saudi Arabian punishment initiative). Another death doula is ‘particularly interested’ in ‘people who practise non-monogamy’ and ‘sex workers’. If what they do is ‘invaluable care work’, as their profile reads, should that not apply to everyone – not just those in a throuple? For an industry that talks so much about the ‘privilege’ of being present at the end of a life, a great deal of energy goes on doulas’ personal preferences.
I mention this trend for preferred clients to Dr Emma Clare, chief executive of End of Life Doula UK, a membership association with roughly 450 members (though I’m told the preferred term is ‘people we support’). When she first started ‘doulaing’, she says, sex workers approached her to organise ‘end of life wishes’ acknowledging ‘the two lives they were leading – one being quite invisible to their biological family’.
‘When people are dying, it’s really important for them to connect with their authentic selves and have a death that honours the life that they’ve lived,’ she says. A group of ‘kink positive doulas’ began in Australia and is growing here: ‘In the same way that we’re opening conversations about death, then the next step is to be like, “Oh, well, let’s just open conversations about everything.”’
About 30 people contact her organisation every month. ‘Most of the time it is an adult child of the person dying because they’re caring for the person, feeling completely burnt out and exhausted,’ she says. The role of sitting with the dying, once quietly undertaken by family, friends, community and religion, has been co-opted by strangers advertising their wares.
Death cafés have their own micro-cultures. Scrolling the listings, you can choose your flavour: Chelmsford insists theirs is ‘fun (it really is!)’. Bedford’s flyer features a skeleton giving a thumbs-up. Cambridge, hosted by the Quakers, promises merely ‘gentle conversations about death’.
At the one in Gail’s, the conversation was mostly about practicalities: what to do with the body once the talking is over. You can, apparently, transport a dead relative yourself, so long as they’re not visible to the public – in the back of a car under a tarpaulin or, as one attendee told me with glee, in a bike trailer. You can bury someone in the back garden as long as you have planning permission, so the home’s future owner doesn’t unearth a skeleton while digging an extension.
I went to another death café in central London. Sixteen of us, each wearing a name sticker, sat in a circle of chairs, as in an AA meeting. A microphone was passed around so we could explain what had brought us there. One woman, in her seventies at a guess, had simply been there as the café was setting up and asked me what was going on. ‘A death café,’ I told her. She looked faintly alarmed. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I don’t think they try to bump you off.’ She stayed for the whole two hours.
It was a much heavier affair than Gail’s. Some people had lost a parent during Covid, without the chance to say goodbye, and were still working through their grief. Others wanted to discuss the anthropology of death, until the host reminded everyone that this wasn’t a philosophy seminar. One man in his twenties said he was so paralysed by ‘death anxiety’ that it stopped him doing anything with his life. The microphone moved on without a beat.
I wanted more than anything to tell that young man to snap out of it – that he was in his twenties, not on his deathbed, and that someone who loved him should give him a proper shake rather than leave him to an anonymous, anxiety-amplifying death circle. But nobody criticises at a death café.
The death positivity crowd would say this all offers the more humane alternative. But a movement that exists in uncritical positivity – that will not tell the twentysomething in the death circle that his anxiety is disordered, that will not ask why a stranger is charging £50 an hour to hold your hand at the end – has a funny way of showing it.
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