If you go
Death Club meets at 6 p.m. tonight (Thurs., Feb. 20) at Tank Space in Traverse City. Details are available here.
Some people come here as a less expensive version of therapy — a kind of support group for just the price of a beer. Others are searching for community.
Club founder Jamie Kramer, who also runs a memorial and grief counselling business called Earthy After, hopes that's what this will become — a community for others to share their fears and grief openly.
With death being such a taboo subject, those feelings often have nowhere to go and can pop up in some of the most unexpected moments.
Kramer talks about a time she was reading a bedtime story to her son.
“I remember reading Keegan a story and then I just bawled my eyes out afterwards,” she said during a recent meeting of the group. “Because I was just like, ‘This is all for nothing.’ I mean that's hard. It is a hard pill to swallow.”
“It is a hard pill to swallow,” replies Sean Case, another group member. “And I don't feel like that. I don't feel like it's not all for nothing. That's all for now. Because right now is all we have.
He’s been coming to Death Club since its first meeting.
“It's really cathartic,” he told IPR, “because I have all these thoughts all day,all the time, like in the back of my head.”
Case thinks about death a lot lately. His father died of Covid a few years ago in prison. And in today’s meeting, he is anticipating another loss.
“Jean, my mom's partner, she got the diagnosis. She has breast cancer,” Case said. “She's 89. She’s a healthy 89, you know, (but) she's just like disappearing from all these people's lives in advance of her death.”
Case says he understands the pulling away. Jean knows who is a priority in her life and is backing away from anyone who isn’t that priority. And for Case, thinking about this — about death — brings up all kinds of tangled feelings.
“I've been thinking a lot about feeling kind of disposable lately,” he said. “But like these days, it feels like it's so easy to be forgotten and cast aside, and it feels like death, like you don't exist in that person's life anymore.”
Kramer and the rest of the club don’t pretend to have the answers to the big questions — like whether our existence serves a purpose, or is just random. That’s not really the point.
Death Club is meant to be a community where you don’t have to shy away from the big questions, where you can talk about how you broke down during your son’s bedtime story or how you’re afraid of being forgotten.
It’s hard not finding friends when you're being this vulnerable.
