The Death Cafł Movement

The Death Café Movement Jack Fong The Death Café Movement Exploring the Horizons of Mortality Jack Fong Associate Professor of Sociology Department of Psychology & Sociology California State Polytechnic University Pomona CA, USA ISBN 978-3-319-54255-3 ISBN 978-3-319-54256-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54256-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939703 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by Fatima Jamadar Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed? “For beauty,” I replied. “And I for truth, the two are one; We brethren are,” he said. And so, as kinsmen met a night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names. —Emily Dickinson For my son, Pattarakorn “Darius” Bhumichuchit PREFACE A few years ago I realized that I was attending more funerals than wed- dings. This book is a product of the transformation that continues from such a realization. Not until I was complete with my doctorate and well into my career at my university did a variety of death circumstances compel me to reflect more critically about death and dying. However, even during graduate school the theme of mortality continued to be an unexplored topic of interest. The concepts behind mortality were somewhat made operative through my research on the Karen Revolution. In early 2004, I had the privilege of access to the Karen National Liberation Army(KNLA)andtheKarenNational Union (KNU) as they prosecuted their revolution against Burmese military rule. During my association with the KNLA 202 Battalion at Mu Aye Pu and my stay at the Thai border town of Mae Sot, I documented their struggle. Access to the inner workings of people engaged in revolution was made possible by a wonderful childhood friend who, in her capacity as a journalist, had contact with the rebels. My stay with the Karen gave me the raw reality checks people experiencing systemic crisis and death must contend with. The Karen had repulsed different brutal military regimes that had governed Burma for decades. Not until Aung Sa Suu Kyi’s rise and Thein Sein’s exit can we now say that the country is slowly healing, although a myriad of unresolved political issues remain. At the time of my stay with the KNLA’s 202 Battalion, political developments were exponentially less hopeful. In spite of their dystopia, the Karen managed to love, smile, dance, and raise their families. Many Karen also got very sick, starved, fought, and died together. ix x PREFACE One important insight I was able to glean from the Karen struggle is how people in survival mode exhibit much lucidity about their wants, their lives, and their deaths. From their experiences, I attempted to understand society when it actually breaks down. It became clear that systemic crisis drastically alters social relationships in ways where a “new” sociology of sorts can be discerned. Indeed, much of sociology does not examine systems that break down; the concept of a “failed state” and its socio- logical consequences simply did not generate the bulk of findings compar- able to, say, the examination of racism within states that have yet to fail. Again, this pointed to the hubris that many intellectuals harbor within their fortress of cultural capital: they induce and deduce from primarily “stable” systemic contexts to draw their conclusions. In this regard, sociologist Kurt Wolff, one of the many iconic sociologists whose ideas will be discussed in this work, was correct in observing how sociology has not been effective in confronting evil. By the time my teaching career was launched, changes to my network of friends and kin who died began to take place. Their deaths synchro- nized with my role of caring for my ailing parents, a bonding process that allowed them to divulge many historical narratives of surviving wars and civil catastrophe. My father survived the Japanese invasion of China’s eastern seaboard during World War II only to later, as a Kuomintang pilot, participate in the Chinese Civil War before beginning the Nationalist exodus to the Republic of China. My mother spent her young adult life in French Indochina only to later witness South Vietnam and North Vietnam embark on their epic war of attrition that compelled both my parents to depart for Laos, where I was born, and to Thailand, where I was raised. Both my parents lost many members in their respective families due to state-related affairs. Thus, the narratives of mortality flowing from this core of governance required epics, heroes, and glorious deaths. Self- authorship of mortality could not withstand how the tides of wars, failed states, and systemic and institutional failure of societies meted out mortality. Both my parents attributed the loss of family and individuals to the hope and collapse of nations. Death informs epics and tragedies. It informed my dad’s nationalism that in later life he acknowledged was misplaced, and it informed my pragmatist and sanguine mom’s hatred of war. Yet their accounts of people’s experiences with systemic crises through wars were rarely con- textualized at the community level even though communities—not only families, individual, and warriors—are destroyed during conflict. In this PREFACE xi context, the state expropriates death from the self and tosses it into the winds of war. In the process, there is the victimizing, glorifying, and demonizing all who have died or will die in ways that varied with political climate and revanchist orientations within and without the state. It was this period in my life that I felt was the right time to immerse myself into new literature about mortality. This turn away from my urban and political sociology writings allowed me to appreciate a more existential approach toward life and living, as well as thanatology in general. Indeed, in the context of mortality, life and death are highly unstable systems in their own right. After reading about and attending my first Death Café where strangers gather to discuss all issues related to mortality, I realized that there was a monograph ready to be written about its unique participants and their concerns. Why? Because community via the Death Café remains intact and kept intact by, of all people, strangers. Just as importantly, there was also a need to illuminate how society at large distorts these concerns if not hide them. Moreover, after cautiously extrapolating from my exploratory study’s data on Baby Boomers—the demographic that primarily attends Death Cafés—I felt that the public needed to consider the concerns and contem- plations they are bringing into the discussion of healthcare and deathcare, and of mortality in general. Because Baby Boomers are no strangers to antisystemic struggles given that many were witness to if not participants in the Civil Rights struggles that began during the 1960s, they are now ready to make some important demands upon if not challenge a healthcare system that will soon be attending to them in sizeable numbers. At Death Cafés, the state and its organs that can quickly expropriate from us our biographies of living and dying are contested during “death talk.” In this regard, Death Café participants—andinour case, the 40 attendees whose voices on mortality constitute the core of communicative data for this exploratory study—have unwittingly become activists against aspects of our social system that deny them their authorship or personalization of mortality. Thus, the content of Death Café talk presented herein offers a refreshingly new twist on life and living and on death and dying, freed from framing by politicians and bureaucrats, freed from the paeans provided by nationalists and hawks, freed from corporate and institutional dictates, freed from war. Like nesting figurines, the voices of our grassroots participants emerge out of their differing yet concentric life contexts, informed by cultural, secular, or religious environments, only to arrive at the destination of our shared humanity as a whole. xii PREFACE Since time immemorial, people have conceptualized and articulated mortality in ways that have rarely been heard. For thinkers like Erich Fromm and Anthony Giddens, to name but a few, the wake of industrial societies saw mortality’s sequestration.

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