Coffee, Cake, and Mortality: Death Cafés and Modern Death Literacy

Tomorrow afternoon, I am going to sit down with a group of people on my college campus, pour some coffee, pass around some donuts, and talk about death.

That's it.

There will be no lecture. No PowerPoint. No lesson objectives. Nobody will be taught the “right” way to think about death. It isn't grief counseling, a support group, or an advance-care-planning workshop. We aren't there to persuade anyone to write a will, complete an advance directive, make funeral arrangements, embrace a particular spiritual belief, or become less afraid of dying.

We're just going to talk.

It sounds remarkably simple. But it raises a much more interesting question:

Why do we need a specially designated place to have a conversation about the one experience every human being shares?

Do We Really Deny Death?

Death studies has a long tradition of describing modern Western society as “death denying.” The basic argument is familiar: dying moved out of the home and into hospitals and nursing facilities; care of the dead became increasingly professionalized; grief became more private; and ordinary people became increasingly separated from the physical realities of dying and death.

There is some truth here. During the twentieth century, medicine, hospitals, long-term care, funeral professionals, and other specialists assumed responsibilities that had once been distributed differently among families and communities. Many people today can reach middle age having had very little direct experience caring for a dying person or a dead body. But “we deny death” is probably too simple.

Sociologist Allan Kellehear challenged the death-denial argument more than forty years ago, pointing out that Western societies did not actually meet many of the criteria scholars themselves were using to define collective denial. Tony Walter later suggested several more precise possibilities: perhaps death has become more hidden rather than forbidden; perhaps we have lost some of the shared cultural language that once helped people talk about it; and perhaps every society simultaneously accepts some aspects of death while avoiding others.

And death certainly isn't invisible.

We encounter it constantly in movies, television, true crime, news, social media, video games, memorials, hospice movements, funeral trends, and public conversations about assisted dying and end-of-life care. We may consume enormous quantities of death while still struggling to say, “I'm afraid of dying,” “What happens when my mother dies?” or “What do I want done with my body?”

Perhaps the problem isn't that we refuse to acknowledge that death exists.

Perhaps we simply don't have many ordinary places where talking personally about mortality feels socially appropriate.

That is where the Death Café enters the story.

What Is a Death Café?

The modern Death Café movement traces its origins to Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz and his cafés mortels. Inspired by Crettaz's work, Jon Underwood developed the British Death Café model with his mother, psychotherapist Sue Barsky Reid. The first UK Death Café was held in Underwood's home in Hackney in September 2011.

The idea spread astonishingly quickly.

As of September 30, 2026, the official Death Café registry lists 24,702 Death Cafés in 100 countries. That number represents registered events rather than a verified census of attendance, but it demonstrates the extraordinary reach of a movement built around a very simple idea.

A Death Café is a gathering where people meet to discuss death in an open, respectful, confidential setting, usually over food and drink. The conversation is participant-directed and agenda-free. The official model specifically says that a Death Café is not grief counseling, bereavement support, an information session, research, consultation, or an event designed to move participants toward a particular conclusion or action.

And yes, cake is officially part of the model.

That distinction matters.

A Death Café may be educational, but it isn't a class. It may be supportive, but it isn't therapy. Someone may leave thinking about their advance directive, but getting people to complete one isn't the goal.

The conversation itself is the point.

Talking About Death Is Not the Same as Understanding Death

This brings us to death literacy.

Death literacy developed largely from public-health and palliative-care research and refers to something broader than simply knowing facts about death. Researchers Kirsten Noonan and colleagues described it as context-specific knowledge about the death system combined with the ability to put that knowledge into practice.

Later researchers developed the Death Literacy Index, which identifies four interconnected areas of death literacy:

• Practical knowledge: knowing how to talk about death, support someone, or participate in care.

• Experiential knowledge: learning through experiences such as caregiving, bereavement, education, or encounters with dying.

• Factual knowledge: understanding things such as advance planning, documents, services, and how death-care systems work.

• Community knowledge: knowing where help and resources exist and who can provide them.

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This distinction is important because someone can be perfectly comfortable discussing mortality and still have no idea what an advance directive is, how hospice works, what funeral options are available, or whom to call when someone dies.

Likewise, someone might dislike abstract conversations about mortality while being highly competent at caring for a dying relative, navigating funeral arrangements, or participating in family decisions.

Comfort talking about death and death literacy are related, but they are not the same thing.

This is also why I would hesitate to say that Death Cafés create death literacy. The research doesn't demonstrate that.

What they may offer is an opportunity to practice one part of it.

What Happens When People Are Given Permission to Talk?

Research on Death Cafés is still relatively small, and much of it consists of interviews, ethnographic work, participant reflections, and studies of organizers rather than large controlled studies. But a remarkably consistent theme appears: People describe appreciating the opportunity to speak and be heard.

Participants report encountering perspectives different from their own, feeling less alone in their thoughts about mortality, reflecting on their lives and deaths, and finding a place where subjects that can be awkward elsewhere become discussable.

Those findings need to be kept in perspective. People who voluntarily attend something called a Death Café are hardly a random sample of the population. Existing studies often include disproportionate numbers of women, White participants, highly educated people, and individuals already interested professionally or personally in death-related topics.

Nor do we have strong evidence that attending an ordinary Death Café reduces death anxiety, makes someone broadly death literate, or causes people to complete advance-care documents.

Those are much bigger claims than the research supports.

What the evidence does support is much simpler: People who attend often value having a place where they are permitted to talk and listen without judgment.

Having attended two Death Cafés myself (both online) that observation feels familiar to me. What interested me wasn't that anyone delivered some profound revelation about death. Nobody did. It was the unusual experience of sitting with people who had collectively agreed that, for the next little while, death was simply an acceptable thing to talk about.

There Is Something About the Table

As an anthropologist, this may be the part I find most interesting. Death Cafés take mortality out of the places where modern society normally expects to encounter it.

Not the hospital.

Not the hospice room.

Not the funeral home.

Not the therapist's office.

Not even the classroom.

Instead, we put death at a table.

Anthropologists have long studied commensality—the social significance of eating and drinking together. Sharing food does more than provide calories. Meals can establish relationships, reinforce identities, create belonging, organize interaction, and mark who is included or excluded.

We should be cautious about romanticizing this. Cake does not possess mysterious death-anxiety-reducing properties, and sharing food does not automatically make every space welcoming or inclusive.

Still, there is something culturally significant about discussing death while holding a coffee cup instead of sitting across a desk from a physician.

The setting says: this is ordinary human conversation.

I think there is also a useful anthropological way to understand the Death Café as a kind of temporary threshold space.

For an hour or two, some ordinary conversational rules are suspended. Subjects that might feel awkward at work, at dinner with friends, or during Thanksgiving with the relatives are suddenly permissible. Strangers may discuss cremation, fear, funerals, grief, decomposition, religious beliefs, their parents' deaths, their own deaths, or what they think makes a life meaningful.

I would call this ritual-like rather than a ritual. Death Cafés don't necessarily provide a shared cosmology, require transformation, or move participants formally from one social status to another.

But they do create a bounded time and place in which the rules of ordinary conversation shift.

The café table does not remove death's difficulty. It changes the social setting in which that difficulty can be shared.

But Whose Way of Talking About Death?

There is another caution worth making. Openly and directly talking about death is not a culturally neutral measure of psychological health or sophistication.

Different cultures—and different families within those cultures—have different expectations about disclosure, autonomy, decision-making, emotion, spirituality, and who should participate in conversations about dying.

Sometimes indirect language is meaningful. Sometimes decisions are understood as family responsibilities rather than individual ones. Sometimes listening matters more than speaking. Sometimes a person simply does not want to talk about death.

Death literacy should not become another way of declaring one culturally preferred style of dying, grieving, or communicating to be the “healthy” one. Nor should silence automatically be interpreted as denial.

A genuinely death-literate community needs room for different ways of approaching mortality, including uncertainty, fear, humor, storytelling, practicality, spirituality, silence, and occasionally saying, “I don't want to talk about this right now.”

Maybe We Need Practice

So where does this leave the Death Café? Probably somewhere more modest—and more interesting—than claiming it will cure our supposed cultural fear of death. Death literacy doesn't mean becoming fearless. With a masters degree in thanatology, I think I'm pretty death literate, but that doesn't mean I don't have any death-related fear.

You can understand hospice and still fear dying. You can have your advance directive completed and still dread losing someone you love. You can know exactly what happens to a human body after death and still find mortality profoundly unsettling.

Fear is not necessarily evidence of ignorance.

Death literacy may instead mean having enough knowledge, language, experience, resources, and social permission to engage with mortality when the need arrives. A Death Café cannot provide all of that. But it can provide something surprisingly rare:

practice.

Practice saying the word death.

Practice asking questions.

Practice hearing someone else's beliefs without needing to share them.

Practice listening to another person's fear.

Practice discovering what you think.

Practice admitting that you don't know.

Tomorrow afternoon, I'll put out the coffee and donuts, arrange the chairs, welcome whoever walks through the door, and host my first Death Café.

I don't know what we'll talk about. That's rather the point.

Sometimes death literacy begins long before the hospital room, the hospice bed, or the funeral home. Sometimes it begins around a table, over a cup of coffee, while nobody is dying.

References & Further Reading

Death Cafe. (2026). What is Death Cafe? DeathCafe.com.

Kellehear, A. (1984). Are we a death-denying society? A sociological review. Social Science & Medicine, 18(9), 713–721.

Leonard, R., Noonan, K., Horsfall, D., Kelly, M., Rosenberg, J. P., Grindrod, A., Rumbold, B., & Rahn, A. (2022). Developing a death literacy index. Death Studies, 46(9), 2110–2122.

Noonan, K., Horsfall, D., Leonard, R., & Rosenberg, J. P. (2016). Developing death literacy. Progress in Palliative Care, 24(1), 31–35.

Richards, N., Koksvik, G. H., Gerson, S. M., & Clark, D. (2020). The global spread of Death Café: A cultural intervention relevant to policy. Social Policy & Society, 19(4), 553–572.

Walter, T. (1991). Modern death: Taboo or not taboo? Sociology, 25(2), 293–310.

Zibaite, G. (2022). Death Café: An ethnographic study of intimate social relationships between strangers [Doctoral dissertation, University of Glasgow].