Dying to Talk

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2017

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There's only one thing in life that's certain: death. Many people believe that talking about death helps us make more of life. Thousands of Death Cafés have popped up in countries across the globe, challenging people to open up about the deceased and their own thoughts and fears about dying. Cafes are often over subscribed with organisers having to turn away individuals from sell out events. Julian Keane visits some of these Death Cafés to explore if a key part of life should be preparing for death. He explores how people across the world deal with death whilst they're living, and if there's really a need for the conversation. Julian also meets sociologist Bernard Crettaz. He began the concept of Café Mortel (Death Café) at an exhibition called La mort à vivre (Death for life) in his Geneva museum. Bernard shares more about his work, the theories behind his Death Café concept and how he feels knowing the world is embracing his concept.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's only one thing in life that's certain death but when was the last time you spoke about it?
0:08.0	I wish death weren't so darn scary for so so many of us, for different reasons. Either we're
0:14.8	afraid of our own death, we're afraid of someone else's death. It means that
0:19.0	there's so many things about life we don't talk about together.
0:24.0	But there's a movement hoping to change that.
0:27.0	Death Cafe.
0:28.0	When you say to people, I run a death cafe,
0:32.0	the amount of people that say death cafe and it literally is like people can't even hear the word
0:38.0	a social franchise which has spread across the world aiming to break down the fear of mortality.
0:44.8	Where people, often strangers, come together to eat cake, drink tea, and discuss death in coffee
0:51.0	shops just like the one I'm sitting in right now. I've had quite a few
0:56.1	deaths in my family. It started with my sister passing away a few years ago.
1:04.0	She was in her early 20s.
1:08.0	So it was kind of like a shock,
1:11.0	like when it happened. To this day I still actually don't know what
1:16.2	happened. How does it feel talking to a group of strangers about death. People still have some trouble in talking about death, thinking about death, and it's a very important space we have here to speak freely openly about it.
1:37.0	I'm Julian Keene and over the next hour I'll be discovering how Death Cafe began,
1:42.0	exploring the theory that we live better lives when we embrace our mortality,
1:47.0	challenging the relevance of this death positivity movement across the world.
1:51.0	And I'll be sharing my personal experiences at a death
1:54.8	cafe for the very first time. So I was just asked about doing this documentary
2:00.7	about death cafes. I just threw up a whole load of things which
	...

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