Kerryn Davey is a death doula – someone who wants people to have a conversation around death before it is too late. Photo: Supplied.
After losing her husband, Kerryn Davey is helping others think about death – all while having a cuppa and a chat.
Just over three years ago, her partner, Jared, died suddenly when he was 44.
“We were both young and healthy – in our 40s and there were no health concerns,” Ms Davey said.
“But we were always just really honest about what we needed, and had open conversations about death.
“In a way, we’d done planning that we didn’t even know was going to be necessary, because we certainly didn’t expect it to be when he was so young.”
Following his death, Ms Davey retrained as a death doula to provide non-medical support in end-of-life planning, inspired by a visit to a ”death cafe” overseas.
“We lived in New Zealand for a few years. After he died, I got that very strong pull to come back, especially in that end-of-life doula space and death-care space,” she said.
“I knew I was always supposed to come back to the South Coast.”
Ms Davey soon turned her eyes across the Tasman and returned to Australia. After establishing the program in Eurobodalla with fellow death doula Deepika Mistry, the pair is expanding it into Bega Valley.
At the Death Conversation Cafe, people sit and talk about something difficult: their death.
The sessions are non-denominational, and it is not a counselling or specialised support space.
Rather, Ms Davey aims to offer a “sense of curiosity and a sense of safety” so people can start a conversation around things like someone’s views on voluntary assisted dying, funeral planning and managing grief.
“Some people come on their own, some people come together as friends or couples,” she said.
“There’s been a few people who have been ill, but mostly it’s healthy people who aren’t sick, [but] they’re thinking, ‘We can’t have those conversations with our kids’ or ‘We don’t know how to have these conversations with our parents’.
“We have all these questions, and it gets shut down because [of a mindset where] you can’t talk about death.”
But Ms Davey said the only requirement was simple: coming with an open mind and being willing to hear different perspectives.
“We’re not necessarily the ones with all the answers [but] we facilitate conversations and have an open flow of conversations for people,” she said.
“Quite often, we find in the room that there are palliative care people, people who are chemists, people who are doctors, other doulas, and there are other people [attending a session].”
While many people push off thoughts of death, Ms Davey believes that having a chat makes it less scary.
“The taboo about that [death and dying] is starting to break down,” she said.
“We’re all going to die, whether we talk about death or not.”
For Ms Davey, preparing with her partner meant the logistics around his death weren’t a burden she needed to carry.
“I wasn’t under the trauma a lot of people are when it is a sudden death [of a loved one], because we’d already worked out what we needed and how to deal with it and what he needed for his funeral,” she said.
“A big part of it is death literacy – having those conversations when people are healthy and not sick.”
The Death Conversation Cafe will be hosted at Bermagui Men’s Shed, 4243 Tathra-Bermagui Road. Sessions are held bimonthly from April, from 2 pm to 4 pm.
Tickets cost $5 and are available via Humanitix.
