Meetup Group: Death Cards in a Farmhouse
We were in an old farmhouse with a box of cards about death, two bathrooms, and three people named Kelly, all spelled differently. One of them was E-Y. The original bathroom is off the pantry, behind the kitchen, behind the sink. Someone had to say that out loud. Someone had also set an alarm so we wouldn't run late. We ran late anyway.
Meetup Group
https://meetu.ps/e/Q83gd/jspM0/i
The game
Mary had adapted the format from Apples to Apples. You pull a card, you read the question, and everybody who wants to share does. You can tweak the question, invent a better one, or pass. When the circle is done, the person who drew the card hands it to the answer they like most. You don't have to say why. It could be the story. It could be, as Mary put it, that "you have really nice eyelashes."
There was no real scoreboard. Mary said the cards tend to even out, and that it doesn't feel like people are sitting there thinking they feel sorry for Joyce and want her to have one. The decks on the table were Death Deck and Hello Death, plus a set of Mary's own questions, up on a website if you want to run this without buying a box. We played Kelly's deck instead: Morbid Curiosity, which Mary had never seen. We went counterclockwise. The new person started.
Name tags helped, a little. There was Lucrezia Eva, and the room had to hear it twice to get the spelling. Someone new to Austin, from New York, said the whole thing was landing like the salon they'd been wanting to host. Not these exact questions, but the same kind of thoughtfulness.
What you want to be buried in
First card: "What item of clothing or what outfit do you want to be buried in or cremated in?"
A gold sequin suit, offered with the admission that it would not compost. Cozy pajamas, flannel, socks, nothing on the head. One person wanted the scene from Amadeus: dumped in a pauper's grave and left for the bugs. Another said maybe a birthday suit, or else the most bizarre t-shirt in the drawer, and then admitted they don't want an open casket anyway, so it probably doesn't matter. Someone's dream was to die owning nothing but a tattered t-shirt and jeans, "and gold wings."
A woman from a Cajun Louisiana family said that in the old days you were buried in your nightgown, for eternal sleep. Her grandmother went that way. So did a childhood friend, in a double funeral, the caskets head to head. Later a young surfer she had dated was dressed in a suit, and she said it just looked stupid. She didn't even know who he was. A great aunt wanted a closed casket, and a mother was so upset she couldn't see which blouse the woman was wearing that the family joke became getting a backhoe at midnight.
Ghosts, and the people who don't buy it
Next card, pulled like a tarot: "Have you ever experienced anything supernatural or otherworldly? Do you believe in ghosts?"
Yes, from a lot of the room. A woman in South Austin, off Davis Lane, talked about her dogs growling at the front door and something white moving past the wall. Warm spots where no tea was sitting. A medium friend felt it in the dining-room wall after a hallway remodel. The offer was: he can leave, or he can stay. He doesn't bother her. A neighbor said a man had died in a swimming pool nearby.
A teenager from what she called the most haunted town in Kansas had worked in an ice cream shop that shared a wall with a morgue. Her boss told her they had a ghost. Nine months later, closing alone, she believed it. A newer Austin house, maybe seven years old, shouldn't have felt haunted, and then four friends with asthma smelled cigarette smoke with no windows open. A friend named Allie said, "that's Zach." Zach was an ex who had died by suicide. One woman, wrecked over a dog named Jasmine, sat outside and asked her to fill the hole. A pendulum clock in the house had stopped when the dog died. After that conversation, it started swinging again. She hadn't touched it.
Then the other half of the table. One person called themselves a humanist, nihilist, atheist, and rejected all of it. They had once considered themselves a practicing white witch, after a Pentecostal childhood, and that had faded. Another said they'd never felt a thing, religious house or not, which is how they ended up an atheist. They'd been to Scottish Rite Theater in Austin plenty of times, the old Masonic lodge north of campus that someone had just called haunted, and never felt anything weird in the building. Quantum physics is strange, they said. We're toddlers picking up sticks. That doesn't make the house haunted.
Someone who had been around people in their last moments still wouldn't call it proof, except for one story they couldn't shake. They were 13, on a bicycle, in the middle of a highway. One pedal, a slip, and a push that shot them and the bike all the way across. Something said "not now."
After a father died, a mother told her caregiver she would last through her birthday, and that she was not going to let the family see her die. Two days after the birthday, a meek sister started driving like the father, holding up the menu, refusing curry, demanding dessert she never ordered. In the car, a son got the same scratch on the back the grandfather always gave. They took the long route home. The caregiver met them at the door. She had just passed. Her favorite caregiver, "the sister she never had," had come on for the weekend shift.
The card at the end of that round went to the idea that our animals never leave us.
Ashes
The next question was whether you'd divide a loved one's ashes among the family or scatter them in different places. Most of the room wanted to know what the dead person had asked for, and then what the living needed. A garden. Glass keepsakes. A stone. A fabricated diamond. Pencils so your people can "write with you."
A friend named Taylor had slept under a big cross necklace that turned out to be a mother's ashes, which took that option off the table for the person telling it. The same person, for fun, would put some in a little jar and donate it to Goodwill and "let the chips fall where they may." Someone had asked their mother what to do and was told she didn't care, then took the ashes illegally to an old family cemetery, dug at the foot of the grandmother's grave, and poured her in. The Big Lebowski warning came up, as it always does. Don't scatter them. Be careful with the wind.
The story I won't forget is the PVC urn. A father refused to pay for a store-bought one and made it himself, four or six inches of pipe with caps, painted blue, a thing that will be in the ground for a million years. The mother died in 2022. They had the cemetery dig the urn up, carried the blue pipe into a small-town cafe because it couldn't be left in the car, and when the restaurant asked what was under the table, the answer was "it's our dad." The sisters had left the mother's ashes at the hotel. They opened the pipe, put her in on top, added a picture of the three girls, and painted it rose gold because that's what she liked. They made the obvious jokes.
Water cremation came up: not legal in Texas yet, 95 percent water and 5 percent potassium hydroxide, the remains described as a beautiful white, something you can put in a garden. Someone with a Jewish mother pushed back on damaging the body at all: burial, a pine box, each person putting in dirt.
Kids, and when to tell them
Kelly drew what looked like a trivia card and got a real question anyway: "What is an appropriate age for a child to attend a funeral?"
Almost nobody wanted a minimum age. Tell the truth. Keep it plain. Treat children like younger people. One person had told a five-year-old, watching Finding Nemo at a friend Margaret's house, that the mom died, and the room freaked out. Someone asked what Fred Rogers would do, and meant it. Deep respect. Explain everything. A four-year-old, after a cat died, went into the backyard to talk to Delilah.
A woman who had been going to funerals since age six, including that double funeral in Louisiana, later knelt in Texas at the surfer's casket, the first one she'd seen without the glass dome they use in Louisiana. His sister came over and asked, "Did you know him?" She still thinks that's the stupidest question she's ever been asked. An eight-year-old banged on the glass dome of her grandmother's casket, screaming that she was still breathing, and was dragged out and not let back in. Nobody talked to her about it. At a death doula training, a therapist said a client in her 70s was still in therapy because she hadn't been allowed to go to her mother's funeral as a little kid. Andy Kaufman came up, obsessed with what's true and what isn't after a grandfather's death was hidden from him until he was 17 or 18. A person in their 40s found out an aunt in South Carolina had died the night before the funeral, and was never given the option to go.
The advice from the people who had been shielded, or overexposed, was about the same. Don't haul a toddler into a formal funeral they're going to disrupt. Ask an older child. Explain what a funeral is. Let them decide.
The timer
The alarm had already gone off. Mary said she can usually get through at least one loop. This time she didn't. Cards went back to Caleb.
Someone flipped a black trivia card anyway. "Which two U.S. presidents die on July 4th?" The room found it boring. One historical card landed: in the 19th century, which way was a body carried out of the house? The choices were through the back, face down, head first, or feet first. The answer they read was feet first, so the spirit wouldn't look back. Then England: it was treason to imagine the king's death, so the king was not allowed to attend funerals. Henry, someone said, didn't attend them either.
A regular death cafe was offered as a place to take the rest of the questions. That was the gathering. We hadn't even made it once around the deck.
My Conclusion
I like this group, and the people in it were really sweet, even though they were talking about death and everyone wanted to explore it. I'll probably go to another one, but I can't say it's something I see myself doing much into the future. Even though everyone is lighthearted, you can't help but feel depressed when you talk about death.
- Kevin
