Death cafés as a strategy to foster compassionate communities: Contributions for death and grief literacy

Abstract

The death-positive movement, the most recent manifestation of the death awareness movement, contends that modern society is suffering from a “death taboo” and that people should talk more openly about death (Koksvik and Richards, 2021). This movement is striving to shift the dialogue about (and place of) death and dying into community spaces (Breen, 2020).

People are dying at older ages and over longer periods of time, as a result of chronic disease trajectories and advances in medical interventions, generating new demographic, and epidemiological trends. In many circumstances, death and dying processes are over-medicalized due to aggressive treatments and practices in hospitals and residential eldercare facilities (Becker et al., 2014). Most deaths happen within such institutions, leaving communities frequently “in the dark” regarding processes of care and illness at the end of life (Breen, 2020). There is a widespread belief that community-based solutions in palliative care and support for the bereaved are needed (Richards et al., 2020). However, as argued by Park et al. (2022), scant attention has been given to community-level interventions for death, dying and grief, or to the public's readiness to fully participate in these interventions.