Talking mortality over coffee at CPT's Death Cafe is far from depressing

Death Café flouts taboos by breaking the silence around mortality. Talking about death is more jarring than talking about sex but, on at least one Monday night a month in Cape Town, people discuss it freely - and talk about what it means to be alive.

A man with a silver ponytail talks about his wish to die by sailing into a storm, on the night I attend. He's recovered recently from a stroke which left him wondering how he would fulfil this dream if he could not move. Also he needs a boat.

A woman with long, ringed fingers and an American accent talks about her friends dying far away, and about the inexplicable body shock she felt at the moment her young niece went into a coma halfway across the US, before she heard about it.

A poised researcher talks about the death of a former addict in a car crash. Until that moment his life had seemed to be going smoothly.

These three were sharing a table with me inside a cheerful restaurant in Woodstock, where much of the conversation revolved around the right to die the way we want to.

The mix of honesty, irreverence and grief around the tables of four was gripping - and people really listened to each other. And made connections.

When the man with the stroke had been in hospital, he was visited by someone he had met at Death Café.

Death Café host Sean O'Connor says the intense human connection is what draws people in, and makes them come back.

Mostly, though, they come to talk about death in all its forms, particularly how it affects loved ones who don't want to talk about it. Our table talked about anguish at the suffering of those we loved. Fury at the wantonness of death. Relief at escaping death. The freedom to choose our death. Nothing is off-limits.

TINY PAPER SKULLS

I'm not averse to talking about death. At least, that's what I thought until I realised, on the way to the meeting, that I've blocked out deaths in my life including the death of my beloved parents.

2017: my father, a devastating loss.

2013: my mother, whose death released her from pain.

1987: 21-year-old close friend in a car crash, suspected security police involvement.

1991: charismatic friend and political leader, assassinated.

2003: close young friend drowned.

2005: family friend, hijacked and shot.

New Year's Day 2018: mountain club buddy, fatal accident.

Strangers also join this gallery of ghosts, like the woman who broke her neck on a mountain bike ride in front of me. Or the pedestrian I tried to resuscitate after he had been run over.

But ghosts and rattling skeletons are absent in The Kitchen on this night, where about 20 people warm the space. The only symbols are tiny paper skulls on toothpicks stuck into a cake, and a lit candle on a metal skull.

People are invited to write words about death on a poster to the side of our table: Eventually. #Grandfinale. Freedom. Pushing up the daisies (remember Monty Python?) were among the contributions.

We had chocolate ganache cake, coffee and tea - preferably no booze to dilute the experience -and a compulsory half-time ritual, when you can switch tables if you want to.

After the cake our groups chose to join together in a circle to talk about topics ranging from a planned trip to India to witness burning bodies on the Ganges, to joking about specials at a mausoleum in Cape Town, which is running out of burial space.

We heard a woman across the circle talk unfalteringly about a potentially serious diagnosis and her revelation that what she wanted most was to be in Cape Town with those she loved - and not chase a bucket list around the world.

Laughter kept tears at bay, and at the end, people held hands before going into the night.

Philip Brink, who owns a coffee roasting business, is a Mortal Mondays stalwart. "Talking about death with strangers is a pretext for talking about life," he says.

"In this context death serves as the ultimate 'ice-breaker', and the intimacy created around a table when strangers commune without constraint is both poignant and exhilarating."

Protocols if you want to hold a Death Café - and anyone can by following the manual - are simply no judging, no speeches and no pamphlets. Therapeutic it may be, but it's not about trauma or grief counselling.

A second Death Café, Death Café Deep South, run by Jean Dixon, recently opened on the Cape Peninsula.

LADY ANJELICA MACDEATH

O' Connor, who's been running this Death Café since December 2016, opened by asking us to find tables and then talk about who we are and why we are there.

"Unpredictability is the outcome," the bright-blue-eyed host says, on why he still does this.

People who would never look at each other outside of the club connect here. "My mom sat next to two heavily pierced people when she came to it and they got on like a house of fire. She said they were kind and generous. Young people really like it," he says.

People come from beyond Cape Town to be there and confront the inevitable, which can be intimidating to deal with alone.

Playwright, actress and producer Jessica McCarthy had been on a search for an open, honest conversation about death since her own very-near-death experience and since her dad committed suicide.

"I finally found it at a Death Café. Inspired by my experiences and those conversations, I wrote a play about life, death, and therapy which stars my drag queen alter ego, Lady Anjelica MacDeath, who tries to figure out why no one wants to talk to her."

O'Connor has always been aware of his mortality because his father walked along the edge of death all his life. When O'Connor was seven years old, his father had a big heart attack. He had another when O'Connor was 13 and, and again when O'Connor started university.

"My father's tenuous grip on life over 30 years had shaped the way I live. My attitudes, values, behaviours can be linked to that familiar scrape of the Grim Reaper's knuckles against the door," he says. "I never knew when he was going to go."

The founder of Death Café, John Underwood, never knew either. The man who stared down death died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage from undiagnosed leukaemia.

In 2013 he popularised the mission of Swiss sociologist and Cafés Mortels pioneer Bernard Crettaz to "liberate death from ... tyrannical secrecy".

Underwood and his mother spread the not-for-profit "social franchise" and now there are more than 5,000 Death Cafés in 55 countries

I understand why. They exert a powerful force on the living and I, for one, would like to go back, which I never expected.

''Mortal Mondays" keep O'Connor's thread of life intact, he says. It's a regular date that reels him in, keeping the fates at bay and him safely on the living side of the River Styx.