The group assembles on Saturday afternoons at 3 o’clock, once a month. There’s coffee, and sweet snacks, and sunlight pouring down from high windows on the west.

Mostly strangers to one another, the small circle of faces sip and chat and nosh and laugh until 4:30, then go their separate ways. Some will return, others will become strangers once more. Individually, they’re just regular folks with something on their minds. Together, they’re the Foothills Death Café.

“We talk about death,” says Patsy Barnes, the café’s cordial hostess and able facilitator. “It’s not depressing. It can be philosophical, it can be spiritual, and it can even be political. What we talk about depends entirely on who comes. A lot of times it’s just somebody telling a story that they can’t tell anywhere else.”

“A woman in her early 30s came. Her friend was dying of breast cancer. She said her friend made a bucket list of five things she’d never get to do. Five of her closest friends had each taken one of those things and fulfilled it in her honor. The whole room got very quiet after she finished speaking. They could see there was a lot more to this death and dying than they thought. As far as I know that woman didn’t come back to Death Café. She just wanted to tell that story, and then she was done.”

The first-ever Death Café was held three years ago in the basement of one John Underwood, an English web designer who’d grown frustrated by the almost universal unwillingness to broach humanity’s single most unifying topic. Three years later, nearly 1,100 Death Cafes meeting on four continents have encouraged many thousands of people to peek through the mortal veil and share their observations.

The stated purpose of Death Café is simple, but says a mouthful.

“To increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives.”

To understand precisely what Death Café is, it may be helpful to understand exactly what it isn’t. Death Café is not a café. Underwood conceived it as a “social franchise” wholly owned and operated by whoever happens to show up at the appointed time and place. He adopted the coffee-house model on the principle that folks are more apt to speak freely out of mouths lubricated by hot beverage and strengthened by heavenly confection.

Death Café isn’t a business. It costs nothing to attend, charges no dues, and nobody’s ever made a dime from its practice, excepting perhaps the grateful barrista.

Death Café isn’t a support group, nor does it exist to counsel the bereaved.

“There’s no plan, no process, and nobody’s got an agenda,” explains Barnes. “It’s a discussion group, plain and simple. A lot of people are helped by listening to the stories and experiences of others, but any advice or guidance comes strictly from the group.”

“Her kidneys were failing and there’s no dialysis clinic up here. To get dialysis she’d have to move down the hill. She wasn’t afraid of dying, but she was afraid of leaving her home of 40-some years. It was a terrible struggle for her. If she didn’t do everything possible to stay alive, would she be committing suicide? If she didn’t get dialysis, would she be letting God down? You could see there was a lot of fear and doubt compressed inside that poor little woman, and her family wouldn’t talk about it with her.

“She told all of this to eight total strangers, and the group helped her think it through. They agreed that God wouldn’t do that; that God would respect and honor whatever decision she made. The transformation was amazing. The group gave her the permission she needed to die when she was ready. She was really looking forward to coming again, but she died before the next Death Café. It was a gift to everybody to hear her story and share her struggle with impending death.”

Barnes launched Foothills Death Café last Spring, holding the first sessions at the Senior Resource Center before moving north to the most life-affirming place imaginable, Hearthfire Treats. As an ethicist, Barnes understands death, and as a former hospice nurse she’s seen her share of denial.

“Only in American is death optional,” she says. “We really think like that – if we don’t talk about it, it won’t happen. But if you don’t talk about death, you can’t plan for it. The consequences of that can be terrible for you and for everybody who loves you.”

Like its parent semi-organization, Death Café’s Foothill franchise is a growing voice in the public conversation. Barnes suspects the surge of interest is rooted in evolving attitudes regarding the rites and realities of modern mortality.

“Baby-boomers are looking to change our ideas about death. We have memories of funerals and rituals that have somehow been taken out of death and dying. Death has been put into sterile, antiseptic hospitals, and we don’t want that. We don’t want to go kicking and screaming into that good night. We want to talk about it, and to know our options.”

Each month up to a dozen frank souls turn up at Hearthfire Treats to talk about it, to learn about their options, to ask questions, offer comments and, of course, share stories.

“Two years ago a dear childhood friend of mine lost her husband. I decided to get our closest 20 friends from high school to all go down to Tampa and support her. While I was there, I wanted to have a special sisters-only get-away with my special-needs sister. The moment I walked in the door she said “I want to be buried next to mom.’ I don’t know why she said that because there wasn’t anything wrong with her. We went to dinner, went to the beach, and had a great time. A week later she dropped dead. Sometimes I wonder if my sister didn’t somehow know that her time was coming. The thing is, without knowing it, I had built the support system of friends that would be there for me when she died. It’s still amazing to me how death can move in a circle, and how interconnected we are.”

“It takes great courage for some people to talk about death,” Barnes says. “They should think of Death Café as a tea party with a few friends where we sit and eat cake and talk about it. That’s how I think of it. It’s comfortable, casual place to learn from the experiences of others, and to share your own experiences. And if you have a story that can help someone else, why not tell it?”