One Year After the Pulse Massacre, an Orlando Group Confronts LGBT Death Head-On

Ariel Leigh is having a busy week. Between picking out movies to watch while recovering from his upcoming gender confirmation surgery and attending memorial events for the one-year anniversary of the Pulse massacre in Orlando, he’s sending me long emails about death, cake, and how those two things led him to a new career in hospice work catered specifically to the needs of the LGBT community.

Leigh is the host of Death Cafe Orlando, a quarterly event where people meet in a private residence to drink tea, nibble on sweets, and discuss death and dying in an open, nurturing environment. Death Cafes were first developed in 2011 by Jon Underwood and Sue Barsky Reid, based loosely around the “cafés mortels” the Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz held in Europe a decade prior. The objective, according to the Death Cafe website, is to “increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives,” and nearly 5,000 individual cafes have been held in countries all over the world.