The Difference Between Death Cafés and Grief Support Groups

The concept of a Death Café is quite foreign to many individuals, so when people come across the name for the first time they often have lots of questions about it, or they confuse it for a grief support group. Today’s post focuses on how Death Cafés and grief support groups differ in purpose and design.

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Grief Support Groups

Grief support groups are held specifically for individuals who are bereaved, which means that they are grieving the death of someone in their life. Grief support groups offer a safe outlet for individuals to share their emotions and their struggles with other grieving people who may be able to understand and commiserate. The bereavement is often fairly recent, but participants can be grieving a loss from decades again.

Many grief support groups follow the self-help model, which means that they offer peer support but are not clinical or therapeutic in nature. Grief support groups tend to be either open (drop-in style) or closed (only those who are registered can attend), and often run from 4-10 weeks at a time with the same participants returning each week in order to build a sense of safety and community. Many grief support groups are also organized around a specific type of loss such as the death of a spouse.

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Death Cafés

The core concept of a Death Café is to provide an opportunity for individuals of all ages (usually strangers) to gather and talk about death over a beverage and a snack (at inception this was tea and cake). It has now become a worldwide movement that seeks to build awareness of death and normalize conversations around death. It allows people the opportunity to face their own mortality in a non-judgemental space full of like-minded people.

Participants may be exploring thoughts of mortality as a result of a recent death in their life, but they do not come specifically for grief support. Unlike grief support groups, which tend to focus specifically on loss, Death Café conversations often end up discussing life and living as much as—if not more than—death and dying. Many in-person Death Cafés are held in coffee shops and bistros or virtually through computer screens (as has been the case over the last few years). Death Cafés are typically held as independent events, so the attendees change at each one.

Both types of groups are similar, but the nature and goal of the discussions are very different, so it is important that they don’t get confused. The group facilitator is responsible for ensuring that the conversation stays on track and that all participants correctly understand the expectations of the group.