At 45, Laura Sweet has thrown plenty of dinner parties. The routine has become familiar: Pick a date, email invites, fire up a few favorite dishes, pour some wine and let the conversations flow.


But for the former hospice volunteer who lives in Walnut Creek, Calif., the dinner she'll host in her apartment on Saturday is bound to stand out.


For starters, she had to include this warning to guests: "This might be the most unusual dinner invitation I have ever sent, but bear with me, I think we're in for a remarkable experience ... This is not meant to be a morbid conversation..."


The meal's theme: death.


On Aug. 24, Sweet, a handful of friends and hundreds of others in more than 250 cities will participate in Death over Dinner[1] , coordinated meals hinged on connecting friends and strangers through conversations about life and death. They'll take place in churches, assisted living facilities, universities and homes in Florida, California, New York, Washington, India and Australia, among other settings.


"We want to talk in an informal way about personal experiences with death. How do people want to die? Have you shared that with anyone? What deaths have you experienced?" said Sweet, a former tech website editor who recently transitioned into taking classes in end-of-life care and found the event via Twitter. "We don't want it to be distasteful, or uncomfortable, but an uplifting atmosphere."


Laura Sweet

Laura Sweet, with her mother, who died of breast cancer Sept. 10, 2012. Sweet will share a remembrance of her mother during the Death over Dinner she plans to host.

Death over Dinner is the creation of Michael Hebb, a Seattle-based artist, activist and former restaurateur who is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Washington's Department of Communication. A year ago, he and Scott Macklin, the associate director of the university's Communication Leadership program, taught a small, experimental graduate course: "COM 592: Design Studio // Lets Have Dinner and Talk About Death." The idea: for students, Hebb and Macklin to create a project bringing views on death to life through food and drink.


"This is what the table does well. It's a good place to have difficult conversations," said Hebb, who formerly lived in Portland, Ore., and was well-known in foodie circles for his restaurants. These days, he's out of the food business in any formal sense, but still focuses his work on "changing culture through the table."


"People talk about death in the doctor's office, awkward family gatherings, lawyers' offices, all of these awful places that are not designed for a conversation that requires a great deal of humanity and often humor, reverence," said Hebb, 37. "But, historically, it's over food where ideas have come alive."


At the University of Washington, his class helped design a "table of truth" -- a simple wooden table where the class met for its weekly three-hour courses -- to dine over death. Doctors, palliative caretakers, coffin makers, funeral directors and health care executives visited the students, sharing their own views on the end of life and how it plays out in the United States.


Hebb, whose own interest was spurred by a chance conversation with a pair of doctors while on a Portland-to-Seattle train trip a few years ago, shared some of the facts that conversation brought to light: 70 percent of Americans want to die at home, but only 20 to 30 percent do; medical bills, including those related to the end of life, are the leading cause of bankruptcy; a Pew Research Center survey in 2009 found that only 29 percent of Americans have a living will[2] .




In April, at TEDMed in Washington, D.C., Michael Hebb introduced Death over Dinner to the crowd.

Now the Death over Dinner includes big names like the health care conference TedMED; spiritual teacher Ram Dass; and Marcus Osborne, the vice president of health and wellness payer relations for Walmart, either participating in or supporting the initiative. Using a robust social media and website campaign, it has gained dozens of new participants since it was announced in the spring.


"For years, doctors have been talking to doctors about how to talk to patients about dying, which is wonderful, but truthfully, the way we need to shift our thinking is through a grassroots movement like this," said Dianne Gray, president of the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation[3] , which has teamed with Hebb to promote the dinners. The date, Aug. 24, is deliberate: It's the anniversary of the 2004 death of Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist revered as a pioneer in the study of death and for coining the five stages of grief.


"We want to give people an interesting, exciting, maybe slightly sexy or attractive way to have this conversation," said Hebb, who asked participants to start the meals with a toast and 20-second remembrance about someone in their lives who has died. "We want to forward this myth that we don't want to talk about death, but I think we just haven't gotten the right invitations."


Hebb has commissioned an interactive website for dinner hosts to plan the meals. After a person answers certain questions about who they will invite and their reasons for hosting, they'll receive an email with a sample invitation and potential questions to bring up at the meal. Some possibilities: What stands in-between you and a deep clear, limitless compassion for all living beings? Are you afraid of death? Why? Does death feel like an end or a doorway?


Hosts also are asked to choose from a selection of dozens of articles, video and audio clips Hebb's team has curated to share with guests as pre-dinner homework. They include a Steve Jobs speech on how to live before you die and an article in which a palliative nurse shares her recollection of the top five regrets of the dying. No. 1 among men? "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."


death over dinner


Part of the interactive Death over Dinner planning guide.

Death over Dinner is among a number of United States-based projects on the end of life started in recent years. They are popularized on social media, where Sweet and many others found Death over Dinner.


Among them are Death Cafes[4] , informal discussions hosted monthly in coffee shops in dozens of American cities, as well as tech startups[5] that focus on funerals and end-of-life planning. There's also a card game, "My Gift of Grace[6] ," that a Philadelphia design firm is developing.


Gary Laderman, a professor of religious studies at Emory University whose specialty includes the history of death traditions and funerals, believes these kinds of efforts are bound to grow.


"New forms of communication change the way we express our understanding of death and how we grieve. Social media is, at least in part, a great democratizing force, so I imagine more and more people will turn to Facebook, Twitter, Death Cafes, to struggle with the meaning of death and how to live with it," said Laderman, who authored Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America.


"What is certain is that we no longer only and exclusively turn to the 'traditional authorities' in these matters, the religious leader/institution, medical doctor, and the funeral home, but instead work with a wider range of cultural resources to make sense of death and dying, and live with the dead."