The Death Cafe Movement Hits 1,000 Events

I. The Swiss Origin

The idea didn't originate with Underwood. It arrived by way of Bernard Crettaz, a Swiss sociologist and ethnologist who spent decades studying how communities process death and mourning. Crettaz, who worked at the Musée d'ethnographie de Neuchâtel, developed a concept he called Café Mortel — a facilitated gathering where strangers could discuss mortality openly, without the structures of religion, therapy, or commercial enterprise.

Crettaz published a book on the concept, *Cafés Mortels: Sortir la mort du tabou* (2010), arguing that modern Western societies had become "death-denying" in ways that harmed both the dying and the living. His cafés were deliberately subversive: they removed death from the sterile domain of hospitals and funeral homes and placed it where it belonged — in the middle of ordinary life, over coffee (Crettaz, 2010).

Underwood encountered Crettaz's work and was transfixed. A Buddhist with a longstanding interest in how people confront impermanence, Underwood saw in Café Mortel a template that could be scaled, replicated, and set loose in the world without any central authority controlling it.

He was right.

II. The Hackney Basement

Underwood hosted the first official Death Cafe on September 4, 2011, in his home. The model he established that evening became the movement's permanent architecture:

• Not-for-profit. Facilitators may cover costs but cannot charge for profit.
• No agenda. There is no program, no speaker, no curriculum.
• No products or ideology. Death Cafes are not a vehicle for selling funeral plans, hospice services, or religious beliefs.
• Accessible. Anyone can organize one. The website offers free guidance.

III. Going Viral

The growth was organic and, by Underwood's own admission, startling. Within months of the first event, facilitators in other British cities were hosting their own Death Cafes. By 2012, the model had crossed the Atlantic. By 2013, Death Cafes had been held in the United States, Canada, Australia, and across Western Europe.

By 2016, deathcafe.com had recorded more than 3,000 Death Cafes in over 30 countries (Underwood, 2016). By 2019, the total surpassed 10,000. As of 2024–2025, an estimated 16,000+ events have been tracked.

IV. Who Comes to a Death Cafe?

Attendees skew female, middle-aged, and college-educated. A significant proportion work in healthcare, social work, or end-of-life care. But the movement has also drawn retirees, students, artists, and people who have recently experienced a loss.

A 2017 study published in *OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying* found that attendees reported reduced death anxiety, increased comfort discussing mortality, and a sense of community they found difficult to replicate elsewhere (Fong et al., 2017).

Death Cafe is not grief support. It is not counseling. The model's power lies in its ordinariness — it treats death as a subject worthy of casual, curious, open-ended conversation.

V. The Death Positivity Current

Death Cafe rode — and helped accelerate — a broader cultural shift known as death positivity, most closely associated with Caitlin Doughty, a Los Angeles-based mortician and author whose 2014 memoir *Smoke Gets in Your Eyes* became a touchstone for a generation. Doughty founded The Order of the Good Death, advocating for death acceptance, natural burial, family-led death care, and transparency in the funeral industry.

Other figures include Dr. BJ Miller (palliative care physician, TED Talk viewed millions of times), Dr. Kathryn Mannix (author of *With the End in Mind*), and the Illuminate Death Festival.

VI. The Facilitators

The movement depends on a decentralized network of volunteer facilitators — hospice nurses, funeral directors, social workers, university chaplains, artists, retirees, and graduate students. Some host one event and move on. Others have facilitated dozens.

Liz Gwyther, a palliative care physician in Cape Town, began hosting Death Cafes to address cultural silence around mortality in her community. In the United States, Megan Moynihan, a death doula based in the Midwest, has facilitated more than 30 Death Cafes since 2015.

The facilitator network is also the movement's vulnerability: no central training, no certification, and variable quality.

VII. The Death of Jon Underwood

On June 27, 2017, Jon Underwood died at his home in London. He was 44 years old. The cause was complications related to diabetes.

His death sent a shock through the global Death Cafe community. Here was a man who had built a movement around open engagement with mortality — and mortality had come for him, suddenly, in middle age.

Underwood's mother, Sue Barsky Reid, helped ensure continuity. The open-source model Underwood designed proved resilient precisely because it was never dependent on a single person.

VIII. Beyond 1,000: What Comes Next

Can it scale without losing its intimacy? Events typically cap at 15–20 participants.

Can it reach beyond its demographic? The core audience — educated, middle-class, disproportionately white and female — does not reflect the full spectrum.

Is institutionalization inevitable? As hospitals and universities adopt the model, there's a risk the radical informality could be domesticated.

What about the digital frontier? Virtual Death Cafes expanded during COVID-19, but the in-person experience remains the gold standard.

IX. The Cake and the Conversation

Jon Underwood understood something the funeral industry had missed: people don't just need information about death. They need practice talking about it.

The cake matters. The tea matters. The informality matters. Because when the setting is ordinary, the conversation can be extraordinary.

Jon Underwood died at 44. He did not live to see the full scope of what he built. But the model he designed — open-source, decentralized, defiantly unprofitable — has outlived him.

Death, after all, was never the problem. Silence was.

Methodology

This article draws on event data from deathcafe.com, academic surveys of Death Cafe participants, and published research in *OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying*, *Death Studies*, and *Mortality*. Growth statistics are based on cumulative event registrations cross-referenced with media coverage.

References

• Crettaz, B. (2010). *Cafés Mortels: Sortir la mort du tabou*. Geneva: Labor et Fides.
• Doughty, C. (2014). *Smoke Gets in Your Eyes*. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Doughty, C. (2017). *From Here to Eternity*. New York: W.W. Norton.
• Fong, C. W., Reid, S. B., & Underwood, J. (2017). "The Death Cafe Movement: An Exploratory Study." *OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying*, 76(3), 231–249.
• Mannix, K. (2017). *With the End in Mind*. London: William Collins.
• Miller, B. (2015). "What Really Matters at the End of Life." TED Talk.
• Willis, R. (2019). "Death Positivity and the Future of Funeral Practice." *Mortality*, 24(4), 385–401.
• Wood, F., & William, A. (2020). "Talking About Death: A Systematic Review." *Death Studies*, 44(7), 436–449.
• deathcafe.com. (2024). "Death Cafe Events Map and Statistics."