Caring Comfort At Home

When the round-robin of introductions reaches Maggie Conlee, she greets the small group with that winkingly blasé tone perfected by Gen Z. “My name is Maggiiieee,” she begins, “and I’m here because I know a lot of dead peoplllle.” The delivery earns a few snickers from the group sipping iced lattes and eating Dr Pepper-peanut butter cake in Union Coffee’s second-floor lounge, but the 24-year-old’s nonchalance is, in a way, the purpose of the gathering. The evening’s event is a death cafe, a salon of sorts to chew on humanity’s most unpalatable subject. 

People show up each month for any number of reasons—grief, cancer, curiosity, free cake—and the mix of participants is as random as the line at the DMV. One silver-haired woman came to confess that she had run a red light and came within an inch of what could have been a fatal collision. A pixie-haired twentysomething says she is struggling with family strife after the loss of her grandpa. There is some friendly debate about cremation. (“If they cremate me, I will haunt them.”) Trerrell Johnson, a young baker wearing a crop top and pink jeans, makes a declaration against clouds on his own funeral program. “In the Black community, we are quick to put people on the t-shirt with the angel wings and the clouds,” he says. The vibe is chill and plainspoken, but there’s an implicit understanding that the conversation could explore seafloor depths. On another night, the room drops into a respectful silence when one man has a tearful epiphany—he is grieving the death of his former self after an injury limited his abilities. 

The concept of a death cafe is a European import, popularized by an Englishman named Jon Underwood, who began inviting strangers into his London home for cake and honest, unstructured conversation about death and dying. Since Underwood’s first gathering in 2011, almost 19,000 events have been held in 90 countries, everywhere from Bahrain to Brazil. (Underwood himself died unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage in 2017; his mother and wife continue the organization’s efforts in his stead.) Though it has taken a while for the concept to take root in Dallas—a death cafe was hosted at CocoAndré a few times before the COVID-19 pandemic shut it down—there are now four regularly scheduled death cafes that have popped up since 2023, all hosted by recently certified death doulas (think: birth doulas but for the other end of life). Several of these doulas have formed a support network for death workers called Death Collective North Texas. Dallas, it seems, is seeing a spark of life in the death positivity movement, which aims to sweep death out of the dark corners of impolite conversation and into the everyday dialogue.