Inside a Colorado death cafe, where you can talk about the most vulnerable topic of all

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GOLDEN — Carrying bright-blue mugs of dark roast and chai tea, they made their way to a wooden table in the back corner of the coffee shop, a nook closed off by two walls of used books.

They were strangers, mostly, yet here to talk about a subject so intimate that the leader advised them not to use names when telling others what was discussed.

They came to talk about death.

On a Sunday afternoon at a Bean Fosters in Golden, 16 people showed up for “death cafe,” a concept that began in England over tea and cake and became a thing in this country in 2013. The idea is that talking about something that is scary, and that Western culture in particular tries to avoid, will diminish anxiety and fear. 

Death cafe was not created for people whose grief is raw. It’s for those who want to talk about how death makes them feel, how they should plan for it, and how accepting that you’re going to die helps you live a better life. They have popped up across the Denver metro, in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, Paonia and Durango. The goal is to normalize a conversation considered too unpleasant for brunch and too much of a buzzkill for a night out with friends.

“This isn’t a presentation for me to talk about what I think about death and dying,” said Karen Keeran, who hosts death cafes in Golden and Wheat Ridge.

Nor is it a bereavement support group, though emotions and tears are likely to spill out on the table. “We hold space for that. Death is a vulnerable topic for all of us.”

The fact that there is “no agenda” means every death cafe feels different. People want to talk about whether people with dementia should get to use aid-in-dying medication, or what it was like to watch a loved one die, a brush with death like surviving a shooting, and the pragmatic questions about planning a funeral. 

At this cafe, a woman who has been coming for years, even on Zoom during the pandemic, brings her homemade binder to show anyone who is curious. “I’m dead. Now what?” is printed on the cover, and inside are pages of passwords and plans, along with some extra notes loosely tucked into the front-cover pocket. The word “EXIT” is printed along the book’s spine. 

Someone asks whether aqua cremation is better for the environment than cremation by fire, and gets a detailed description of how it works — the body is placed in a metal cylinder with alkaline water, which causes decomposition. And yes, loved ones can have a vial of the water along with the powdery “ash” that is actually crushed bones. 

One woman can say from experience that power of attorney for a loved one ends upon their death, meaning you can’t use their credit card to pay for their funeral expenses. This is why you should prepay, she says. 

The breezy love song “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl” is playing on the coffee shop sound system as the group discusses what happens if you prepay for your funeral and then move to another state, a reminder that the rest of the people are here not to discuss death but to simply have coffee and send emails. 

Megan, 41, came not because she has experienced any major loss in her life or is expecting to die any time soon, but because she finds death terrifying. She grew up Catholic, with the fear that even being mean to her sister would land her in hell. 

“Even into my adulthood that fear has continued,” she said afterward, uncomfortable using her full name because going to death cafe felt like stepping out of everyday life and going somewhere where she could remain unknown, sort of like therapy. “I am very uncomfortable with the idea of death, the fear of losing people in my life.”

After attending two death cafes, the fear is still there. But the conversations help, mostly because she’s learned other people have similar anxieties and that getting more comfortable talking about them makes her appreciate life more. “You leave there and you’re like, life is fleeting and we don’t have much time and don’t sweat the small stuff,” she said. 

The accountant turned death doula 

Karen Keeran, who leads the Golden death cafe, says she was “born into death.” Growing up, her family was “immersed in it.” 

Keeran’s sister, who was ill when Keeran was still in utero, died of a heart defect when she was 6 and Keeran was not yet 1. A few years later, her mother died of stomach cancer, a disease Keeran suspects was due to the gnawing grief that no one in the family knew how to process. 

Keeran, born in 1956, was left with a stoic, World War II veteran for a father, a dad who never talked about his dead wife or daughter. 

Their house was quiet and sad. “There were very few tears, just a great deal of silence,” she said. “For a long time, I was really angry. It was part of my spiritual journey to reconcile with my deep sense of abandonment. He didn’t physically leave the building, but he was not emotionally present with us.”

Her father remarried quickly and started a new family. Keeran’s older brother, who was 8 when his sister died, left home and got married at 19, which Keeran thinks was a “grief reaction.”

Keeran moved in with her grandparents, but her grandfather died when she was 14 and entering high school. At 19, she came home from a day of classes at the commuter college she attended to find her grandmother on the floor. She died a few days later. 

She locked away as many of the emotions as she could for the next four or five decades. She chose a career in numbers, becoming a CPA and a businesswoman. She carried a “hole inside” of her the entire time, and mostly ignored it. 

But when Keeran retired from her business career four years ago, after discovering yoga and meditation, she “had an epiphany.” 

She had meditated for more than an hour. “I was reaching to my heart, to the universe if you will, saying where do I fit? What can I contribute?” But there was no answer, until she woke up the next morning and it came to her: “You need to go back to death. You need to be a death doula.” 

Keeran first worked two years in hospice, sitting beside people as they crossed over to death. In the past three years as a death doula, she has helped 50 clients prepare for their deaths. Some were dying, and she visited with them until their end. Some were making arrangements for their parents, and some — usually older but some as young as 40s or 50s — were making future plans for their own deaths. 

Keeran also runs three Jefferson County death cafes, guiding conversation with gentle questions. “Tell me more,” she says, or “Explain that,” when attendees comment that they are scared of death or that no one else in their life wants to talk to them about it.

She avoids the word “heal” when talking about grief. Instead she calls it a process of “grief metabolism.” 

“I don’t feel like we heal from grief, ever,” Keeran said. “We integrate it into ourselves and it metabolizes.” 

It’s the fear of death that prevents people from “being present” for themselves and for others who are dealing with death, she said, and the way to overcome that fear is to understand that death is part of life, not what comes after.

“We’ve been enculturated and taught that death and life are like opposite sides of the same coin, like we know death is there, but it’s on the opposite side of life,” she said. “The truth is, death is the opposite of birth. We enter this world and we exit this world, and both of those bookends are part of life. They’re not separate from life.”

Two deaths and not quite a “near-death experience”

Two deaths and a fall on a mountain brought Maura McInerney-Rowley, 34, to the wooden chair at the back of the coffee shop. Death is now her job. 

The first major death in McInerney-Rowley’s life sent her into a “deep, dark hole” that rocked her life toward a new course. Her mother had battled breast cancer for 15 years before she died at home in Philadelphia, just before McInerney-Rowley and her two moms had planned a huge party to celebrate their three December birthdays. McInerney-Rowley was in college at the University of Vermont and about to turn 21.

It would take a year before she felt joy again — on a rare powder day in Vermont when she felt light, like she was skiing on clouds. 

McInerney-Rowley chased the feeling by moving to Aspen, running from the seemingly suffocating job opportunities that followed college graduation and instead becoming a wedding planner in one of Colorado’s wealthiest towns. But after a while, watching brides hug and cry with their moms was too much for her to bear, so McInerney-Rowley left Aspen for graduate school at the University of Michigan.

The second death was far less personal, yet it rocked her life, again.

While attending a wedding in Boulder, where McInerney-Rowley was to read a poem for the bride about loved ones who are gone, the bride announced on the morning of the wedding that one of the guests had been killed. The man was stabbed near Pearl Street after partying with them at the rehearsal dinner. The bride went through with the wedding, and McInerney-Rowley still read the poem, which hit the guests on a whole new level. 

A day later, McInerney-Rowley was on a plane to Alaska for a backpacking trip with fellow business students. As the group hiked the Alaskan wilderness, trudging through sideways rain, the 5-foot-1 woman carrying a 60-pound pack lost her balance and tumbled down the side of a mountain. 

Calling it a “near-death experience” is too dramatic, she said, but she was scared for her life. 

“This guy had just died at the wedding,” she said. “Then I thought I was going to die.” 

And in case McInerney-Rowley needed one more nudge from the universe, the backpacking guide assigned to her group had just experienced hospice with his dying father, which led to them discussing death as they trudged through the miserable weather. 

Back at business school, McInerney-Rowley won a pitch contest with a business plan that allowed people to die where they wanted — the wilderness, beside the ocean, their favorite place instead of “under bright lights and with the beeping noises” of a hospital bed. After graduation, she helped a death doula on Cape Cod — where her mom moved after her other mom’s death — open a hospice called the Lily House. 

McInerney-Rowley moved to Denver in 2024, where she and a business partner run Hello, Mortal, a death-focused business that helps people “transform the denial of death into a celebration of life.” She offers individualized grief support recommendations (like cold plunges and travel), memorials, living funerals held while people are still alive, and helps people get their financial and advance directives in order before they die. 

McInerney-Rowley is also building an online platform where people will be able to “contemplate and prepare for end of life” by following a guided module. At the end of the module, they will have a digital version of a book for loved ones to use upon their death. “It helps you first come to terms with the fact that you are going to die” and then moves toward decisions like advanced directives, burial or cremations or aqua cremation, she said. 

She and her business partner also came up with what they call “death archetypes,” which began with McInerney-Rowley creating a survey and passing out survey QR codes at the farmers market in New York City’s Union Square. 

With data from about 70 people, she created eight archetypes, similar to astrological signs, that describe how a person views and deals with death — the existentialist, the lover, the ancestor. The point of taking the quiz and discovering your archetype is that it reduces anxiety about death, a hypothesis McInerney-Rowley hopes will one day become the subject of a clinical trial. 

“We live in such a death-denying society,” she said. “How do we make something that is approachable, and dare I say, fun?”

She’s a phoenix — one who believes that life is a “grand journey” that leads to the greatest adventure of all, “liberation of consciousness from the body in the moment of death.”

“Mini deaths,” a “solo ager” and the research of death

For Daniela Lien, who was attending a death cafe for the sixth time, the conversations are helping her deal with recent losses in her life. Changes in her health. The loss of her hair. Letting go of hopes and dreams. She sees the changes now as “mini deaths” that people go through in preparation for final death.

Lien, 38, believes she is in “bardo,” the existence between death and rebirth, according to Buddhism. 

“There’s so much of myself that died that I’m trying to redefine what life means for me right now,” she said. “It helped me to reframe losses, like what it means to lose something or what it means for it to go away, as like a practice.”

Each cafe she has attended has a different “flavor,” she said. They are typically dominated by women, though sometimes there are a couple of men. In smaller groups, the conversation has been deeper, more spiritual, with questions of what happens metaphysically when we die. Lien has learned a lot, too, from more practical discussions about how to prepare loved ones for their deaths or your own.

Ann, 74, learned the term “solo ager” at death cafe. Her husband died 10 years ago after a short illness and she “didn’t have a good plan” for the rest of her life, or her death. She ended up retiring, downsizing from their too-big home in Evergreen and taking up new hobbies including making greeting cards and creative writing. 

She wants to plan and pay for her death arrangements ahead of time, especially since she has no close family to deal with it. 

Barbara, 68, came because she is processing two deaths in her family and because those deaths made her think more about how she wanted her own to go. Her father died in a memory care facility and then her younger brother was found dead in his home after authorities were called to do a wellness check. He had been dead a month. 

Now she and her two sisters talk on the phone or text daily, but instead of talking about the losses, they describe what they’ve planted in their gardens and how it’s growing, or they share what they call “today’s pretty picture.” It’s usually a flower. Or a zoo animal. Anything that made them feel happy.

“We put our heads together about how we could stay connected because we understood how short time is,” she said.

Along with all the death, Barbara is also dealing with the loss of a part of herself. She recently retired, which gave her way more time to contemplate things — like whether there is an afterlife — than she had before. At her first death cafe, she was too overcome with emotion to say too much, but she hopes that at a future cafe, she can join a philosophical discussion about her “angst about what happens after we die.” 

She’s tried this before with friends, but then “sometimes people want to save me,” she said, and that’s not what she’s asking. 

Ruth, 68, jumped wholeheartedly into death cafe. The Centennial woman spent the week after attending her first cafe watching movies and listening to podcasts about death. 

She came in the first place because she recently watched her brother die, an experience she described as “spiritual.” She had hopped on a plane to Tennessee, where her brother was in a memory care center, then drove through pouring rain with the fear that she would not make it in time. She was able to sit beside him for 18 hours before he died. 

In the midst of her grief, she felt afraid. Not afraid of dying exactly, but afraid of living with a lot of pain or requiring a lot of medical intervention.

And like everything else in life that she has feared, the way to tackle that fear is with research, she said.

“I find that talking about anything that I’m afraid of helps me relieve the fear,” she said after the conversation in the bookstore nook in Golden. “Death cafe brings you alive.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.