“If you are here at Carleton, if you are a human being in the world, you will die. And that means that, as a person, no matter who you are, where you come from, what your background is, you’re going to ask yourself questions about what it means to be on the road to death,” said Schuyler Vogel, chaplain and co-creator of Carleton’s new Vital Death Cafe.

A Death Cafe is the kind of place where you can discuss exactly these kinds of questions.

“It’s a space for whoever needs to gather to talk about death and dying and mortality,” said Palmar Álvarez-Blanco, a Spanish professor, certified Death Doula and co-creator of the Vital Death Cafe.

The idea originated with Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, who organized the first “café mortel” in 2004. In 2011, web developer Jon Underwood adapted the idea to London, launching a website that helped Death Cafes into a global movement. Some Death Cafes are triggered by a hurricane or other deadly event in a community, while others provide space for medical professionals to process.

Carleton’s Vital Death Cafe, however, is a weekly dinner attended by a mix of students, faculty, staff and local community members.

“When I was teaching my class, Death and Dying Under Capitalism in Spanish and co-teaching with Daniel the other class, Death Dying and Discussion, I realized that a lot of people were craving these conversations,” said Álvarez-Blanco. “I believe in intergenerational conversations, and I thought we don’t really have a lot of spaces on campus for students to meet elders or retired people or people who are in their 50s, other than your professors.”

Each meeting has a topic, which for this term are “Encounters with Death and Mortality,” “Understanding Suicide,” “Medical Assistance in Dying,” “Living Will” and “What does it mean to accompany someone who is dying?”

The Cafe is limited to 14 participants to allow for intimate discussion, with participants selected through an application form. For this term — its first time running it — the Vital Death Cafe received 48 applications. Álvarez-Blanco said they are planning to run another round in Spring and are considering making it a  long-term offering as well.

“I think what it speaks to is that people in the Carleton community have a real yearning to dive into not just death, but to the great questions of life. To wrestle with things that really matter on a personal level, not just on an intellectual level,” said Vogel.

Both Vogel and Álvarez-Blanco emphasized that the cafe was not structured like an academic class but rather as a discussion. “We don’t think about it as Palmar and I are the experts, or that someone in the room is an expert,” said Vogel. “This is not about intellectualizing death.”

In their first meeting, the participants all signed a confidentiality agreement and began talking about what death meant to them. The Carletonian reached out to some student participants, but they declined to be interviewed due to the personal nature of the subject matter.

“It’s always interesting when you mix experiences, but when you mix people from different generations, that is always fascinating in a way,” said Álvarez-Blanco at the first meeting. “Because you have people who are in their 60s and 70s, wondering about what’s coming next. Then people in their 20s, thinking ‘what does that mean?’”

Álvarez-Blanco first became interested in death in her twenties, when her brother received a terminal cancer diagnosis.

“It was a very difficult death because he was not ready. He was not expecting it at all. He was a pilot, dreaming of the next thing. He was going to get married and save enough money to buy a farm and retire at 50. He had all these kinds of dreams, and he was a workaholic, so he spent most of his life working,” said Álvarez-Blanco.

By the time her brother went to the doctor, he had “six months to digest his whole life.” She described all the questions he was suddenly asking himself: “Why did I waste my time doing things I didn’t want to do? What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of work? What is the meaning of dying?”

“I remember talking to him a lot about a lot of different things and thinking to myself, ‘We don’t know how to do this.’ We don’t talk about this,” said Álvarez-Blanco.

She also realized through this process that she had a particular affinity for approaching death when others found it uncomfortable.

“For some people, it is very difficult to be with somebody who is dying. You don’t know what to say. You feel uncomfortable, or you are not ready. Some people cannot bear the fact that their family member or friend is dying, right? And I realized that it’s not like I don’t mind, but it’s life. Life is also learning how to die,” said Álvarez-Blanco.

After graduate school, Álvarez-Blanco trained to become a certified Death Doula, which she described as “someone who is trained to support a person who is going through their last stages in life.”

It was during her Death Doula training that she first attended a Death Cafe, and within her current capacity as a Death Doula, she realized the Northfield community needed one of their own. She asked Vogel to co-lead near the end of last year.

Vogel has long worked with people grieving, dying or grappling with death in his work as a pastor, but this is his first time leading a Death Cafe.

“Death is scary, I think. It’s distressing. It’s sad. It’s personal. There are so many reasons why death makes folks uncomfortable and shy away. It shows us to be vulnerable. It shows us to be all in it together in a way that we often don’t feel like we should feel,” said Vogel.

“Why is it a taboo in our society to talk about death and dying? Why is it that every time you encounter a death, you feel awkward talking about it, or you don’t feel the space is appropriate to talk about your grief? Why, as a society that is so into talking about every single aspect of our life publicly, why are we not able to talk about death?” asked Palmar.

Both co-leaders encouraged people to normalize conversations about death in their own lives, even outside of a Death Cafe. Vogel said that although it is less visible in our society, young people are also touched by death, in ways like their own health, grief, self-harm or mortal questions.

“I hope that students are having conversations about death outside of official ways, like talking to your roommate at 1 o’clock at night about the real stuff of life and death,” said Vogel.