Roundtable Death Café feat. Corinne Alstrom-Sonne and Kathy Kastner – November 2022 (Read More)

Welcome back to the Completed Life Initiative’s Roundtable Death Café series!

The guest panelists for this session are Corinne Alstrom-Sonne and Kathy Kastner; two experienced Death Educators with years of experience running Death Cafés. The facilitators helped guide the discussion and led us into the Death Café portion of the event.

Visit Corinne Alstrom-Sonne’s website – DeathCoachCorinne.com

Visit Kathy Kastner’s website – BestEndings.com

We would also like to thank Reimagine End of Life for co-hosting this event on their summer calendar. For more events through Reimagine, please visit their website – letsreimagine.org

If you would like to join the next session of the Roundtable Death Café live, including participating in an actual Death Café, visit the Completed Life Initiative’s events page for registration as it becomes available – completedlife.org/events

The first part of this event, which is what is presented in this video, is an open forum for panelists to deconstruct the stigma surrounding death and dying. Our panelists discussed how death cafés can destigmatize the subject of death through local, small group connections; how these events can advance empathy and compassion towards grief and end-of-life suffering; and how individuals and organizations, on both a local and national scale, can further promote #deathpositivity.

A Death Café is a participant-led discussion of death with no set agenda, objectives, or themes. The model is based on a similar format from Europe that has since been adapted and popularized in the United States. Death Cafés can occur online or in-person and they often have tea and snacks, but their free-flowing nature lends them to be adapted even further, which is what we have done.

(Originally recorded on November 9th, 2022)