A low, friendly hum moves through the room—the sound of people who don’t know each other well but who feel unexpectedly at ease in one another’s presence. There’s an openness here that pulls in careful listeners as each person takes their turn speaking.

Jon Underwood, the man behind the Death Café movement, wasn’t a psychologist or a spiritual guide. He was a former London city worker who stumbled on the idea after reading about a Swiss sociologist’s experiment with “café mortel” gatherings. The concept struck him immediately. People needed a place to talk about death—not in hospitals or in crisis, but around a table, in the middle of ordinary life.

So, in 2011, he pushed the furniture aside in his living room, made a pot of tea, and invited a small group of strangers to talk openly about mortality. That first meeting was quiet, simple, and a little awkward—but something meaningful happened in that room, something that would eventually spread to more than 90 countries.

Underwood felt that modern life pushed death so far into the background that people forgot they were mortal—and with that, forgetting what actually matters.

Broadly speaking, scholars agree on what happens in a Death Café: people gather to create a communal space where the usual taboo around talking about death softens, and conversations about mortality unfold that rarely occur elsewhere. Where opinions diverge is in which aspect of the Café people are actually benefiting from. In other words, what exactly is driving this peculiar practice’s worldwide appeal?

Scholars offer two main answers. One is that the value is extrinsic—that what matters most is what people take with them when they leave. The other is that the value is intrinsic—that it comes from the experience itself, from speaking honestly and feeling connected in the moment.

Within the intrinsic camp, one view holds that the value of a Death Café lies in the moment of expression itself—whether you’re finally giving voice to something the death taboo buried for years, or hearing someone else articulate a feeling you’ve never quite had the words for.

Anyone who has ever sat in a room where honesty is permitted—a recovery meeting, a support circle, a late-night conversation—will know the feeling: the sudden warmth that comes when someone else’s story echoes your own.

Sociologist Naomi Richards and her colleagues, who have attended and helped host Death Cafés as part of their research at the University of Glasgow, describe how conversations often spill out in a “torrent of speech.” People speak with an urgency that suggests these thoughts have been held in for a very long time. And when the rush finally slows, participants often look “lighter,” as if the release of those long-suppressed words had lifted something real from their shoulders. Richards sees this release as the clearest expression of the intrinsic value of a Death Café—the meaning that comes from saying what has long been unsaid and feeling it land in a room of listeners.

In the same way art invites someone to lift a feeling out of themselves and set it into the open air, the Death Café turns private fears and quiet, late-night thoughts into something shared. Feelings that rarely see daylight become part of a collective conversation. And that act alone—breaching a taboo together—is often what makes the room feel meaningful.

Cultural anthropologist Solveiga Žibaitė, who works with Richards’ team at the University of Glasgow, also locates the value of the Death Café in what unfolds inside the room rather than in what follows after. But for her, it is the sense of belonging surrounding the act of expression—not the expression itself—that draws people in.

The conversations that unfold there feel unusually precious in a culture that keeps death at arm’s length, cultivating a kind of intimacy and connection that people rarely find elsewhere. That intimacy is made all the more poignant because of its impermanence; it lasts an hour or two before dissolving again. She celebrates this temporary little community—a fragile, fleeting togetherness.

Žibaitė’s description of the Death Café as a “neo-tribe” echoes moments many people know—helping strangers push a car out of the snow, joining a drum circle, or gathering with others in a fleeting moment of shared purpose. For a moment, a group becomes a community.

Žibaitė notices how people often slip into talking about the fact that they’re talking about death. This “meta-talk,” as she calls it, reveals that participants aren’t just engaging with a topic—they’re savouring the rare chance to share it together.

For Žibaitė, this is the heart of the appeal. What people value most isn’t any single insight about mortality, but the experience of belonging that emerges when strangers speak freely about something usually kept behind closed doors. In her view, death is merely the vehicle; community is the destination.

When tensions or disagreements surface—as they sometimes do—facilitators gently guide the group back into that meta-space, reminding everyone of the shared purpose that brought them together in the first place. That return to the “we” is what preserves the Café’s atmosphere: a fleeting little pocket of connection that attendees rarely encounter anywhere else.

Within the extrinsic view, the value of a Death Café lies not in the experience of the gathering itself, but in the deeper effects it leaves on a person’s psyche. In this perspective, conversations around the table loosen something buried—the fear, uncertainty, or quiet dread that often surrounds death. In their view, the conversations around the table loosen something buried—the fear, uncertainty, or quiet dread that often surrounds death.

While this may sound similar to the expressive release emphasized by the intrinsic view, the focus here is different: intrinsic theorists attend to the moment of connection itself, whereas extrinsic theorists look to what endures after people walk out the door.

Miles and Corr recount attendees describing their experience as “safe” or even “interesting”—words that suggest a shift in how they relate to mortality. By lifting the taboo, people leave feeling steadier and more prepared to face the fact of their own finite lives. In this view, the value of a Death Café lies not in the moments shared inside the room, but in the steadier breath one takes after walking out.

There’s something about putting death into words that seems to ease its grip. Perhaps the answer hides in an old adage: to name it is to tame it.

We avert our eyes, so we don’t have to feel the fear—but tragically, doing so only feeds it. The moment you give words to something long avoided, it shrinks back into its actual size. Part of that comes from simply being willing to look straight at the thing we fear. In the dim light of uncertainty, a rope can look like a snake; clarity comes only when we dare to look directly.

But our instinct to look away doesn’t happen in isolation—it’s quietly reinforced by the people around us. Miles and Corr compare the experience of the Death Café to a “horse on the dining-room table.” Everyone sees it. Everyone feels it. But no one wants to be the first to speak.

In a series of classic psychology experiments, participants were shown a “target line” and asked to identify which of several comparison lines matched its length. They believed they were completing the task alongside other participants, but those individuals were actually actors—“confederates” instructed to give the wrong answer on purpose. The goal was to see whether real participants would still go along with the group even when the group’s answer was clearly wrong. Social psychologists have consistently found that this kind of conformity is surprisingly common.

Again and again, real participants went along with the confederates, even when the correct answer was obvious. Faced with a unanimous group, people began to doubt their own eyes and followed the crowd, revealing just how powerful external cues can be. Silence, it turns out, is just as contagious. And death is one of the places where that collective quiet is the loudest.

We take our lead from one another far more than we realize; when a room falls silent around a subject, most people follow suit without even thinking about it. The longer the silence stretches, the heavier and more forbidden the topic begins to feel—until a single conversation breaks the spell. If silence spreads easily, then so does bravery.

I’ve seen the same dynamic play out in everyday life. A friend of mine, a pastor, once described a check-in circle with volunteers at his church. People were offering polite, surface-level updates until one person—someone in recovery who was used to speaking honestly about their struggles—shared something real. The entire room shifted. Everyone after them opened up a little more, as if that single act of vulnerability had given the rest permission to be human too.

Whether people come for the relief, the companionship, or the softening of old fears, something about the Death Café clearly meets a need that modern life leaves unsatisfied. And maybe that’s why the movement has spread so widely: not because it offers answers, but because it gives people a place to speak honestly in the company of others.

In at least one study of Death Cafés in Japan, organizers observed that many attendees came only once—raising the question of whether the Café’s impact may unfold within a single gathering. Whether those participants report experiencing benefits of any kind is something our own study is positioned to explore. What the existing evidence does show, however, comes from the hour itself: people describe the atmosphere as “safe,” “interesting,” or unexpectedly grounding. Their language points to a shift that arises in the moment—with no clear evidence of what, if anything, lingers afterward. If the Café softens people’s fears, the qualitative accounts suggest it does so in real time. In that sense, the Death Café may not be a means to an end, but an end in itself.

If you’re interested in participating in ongoing research on the Death Café experience at VIU, you can learn more or sign up here.