A local discussion group meets regularly at the Irondequoit Public Library in Rochester to talk about death and dying, all led by a death doula
By Patrick Sawers
No one likes to confront their own mortality. The grave nature of the matter hardly lends itself to polite and pleasant conversation.
For those with death and dying on the mind, though, a local discussion group meets regularly to help diminish anxieties surrounding life’s most solemn inevitability.
“Death cafés are places for people to come and talk about anything related to dying that is in their hearts and on their minds,” said Jennifer Sanfilippo, who hosts a death café monthly at the Irondequoit Public Library in Rochester.
“These events are free and open to the public. They’re usually filled with strangers who feel alone with their thoughts about death and about dying.”
The meetups are generally held in groups of 10 to 15 and they cover a variety of topics with everyone afforded the chance to contribute, Sanfilippo said. Often the groups wind up giving participants the opportunity to discuss a range of things they wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to talk about.
“There are as many reasons as there are people who show up,” she said. “For example, you’ll have a mother who wants to talk about how she wants her end of life to look, but her children don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to think about it. They can’t put their minds in that space. So she will come to the group and talk to other people who might have similar experiences with the lack of family engagement in the conversation. Then you have people who have lost partners or parents, loved ones who don’t have a place to kind of work through some of their thoughts about what happened and their family’s final days.”
But these aren’t morbid gatherings, Sanfilippo insisted. The free-form discussions often blossom into a celebration of life, she added.
“What you have, interestingly enough, is you have a lot of laughter, because the conversation turns into, ‘How do you want to live your life?’” she said. “We’re all dying every day, life and death go hand in hand. So what do you want your purpose to be and how are you living your purpose? It really is quite remarkable and I am honored that people come and open up to have these conversations with me.”
Sanfilippo has been hosting death cafés since late 2022, after a personal tragedy caused her to reassess her professional trajectory.
Following her husband, Jim’s, death from leukemia in July of that year, Sanfilippo decided to forge a new career path for herself — one that made use of the skills and expertise she’d gained while caring for Jim throughout the final six months of his life.
“I was a lobbyist for the financial industry and after my husband passed I made this big pivot,” she said. “I volunteer at a local hospice now and actually I am a death doula as well. I’ve been working with a family and you can really see the impact on their faces. You really can’t eliminate the pain of losing a loved one, but you certainly can prepare for the experience.”
The concept of death cafés emerged from the United Kingdom and developed over a decade ago by a mother and son from London, largely in response to Western culture’s growing tendency to regard death a taboo subject, Sanfilippo said.
“They started it because they recognized that, increasingly, the idea of death and dying is more and more being shoved into a closet,” she said. “It was never anything that people loved to talk about, but it was more normalized. People were laid out in the living room when they passed away, funerals were often held right in the home. It was so much more socialized and mainstream and we really have become a death-denying culture.”
This is something Jessica Heintz can attest to, having grown up in Sardinia, Italy, which holds the proud distinction of being one of the world’s five “blue zones” — regions where general health and life expectancy are remarkably high.
“The place that I come from is becoming more and more known because of the blue zones. And in these places some of the people there are living up to a 100 years old,” Heintz said. “It is very well-known for longevity and because I come from one of those places I have always been pretty curious as far as how that relates also to death.”
Heintz came to America five years ago, settling in Buffalo and becoming involved with death cafés at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially she attended them online, but once businesses began reopening she decided to start hosting a monthly in-person gathering of her own. Rather than maintaining a consistent location, Heintz said she instead prefers to schedule her meetups at a variety of venues in and around Buffalo.
“The first one was at the Merry Shelley, which is a horror bar on Hertel Avenue and that was really good,” Heintz said. “I did the first two there actually. And then eventually I moved because, even though it’s very cool as a location, it is a little small and conversation can be a little bit difficult to hear, so we tried a few other locations. And I like to change the locations in order to provide variety and to move around so other people can find it.”
These sessions, both Heintz and Sanfilippo noted, tend to foster an open and welcoming environment; where participants are free to discuss sensitive issues in a controlled and comfortable setting.
“But I always want to be clear that I don’t have a magic wand,” Sanfilippo added. “I can’t take anybody’s pain away and I can’t give people answers about what happens after you die. But what I can do is create that community so that people don’t feel alone and the more they talk about it the more they build that sort of resiliency for the topic and that emotional muscle.”