Let's Talk about Death (Over Dinner) with Michael Hebb

For Michael Hebb, the “powerful architecture” of the common dinner table has long been a source of inspiration. He began experimenting in Portland in the late nineties, co-creating a series of open-air teahouses and gathering spaces with architect Mark Lakeman (he and Lakeman went on to co-found the nonprofit placemaking organization The City Repair Project). Then came Hebb’s underground pop-up supper club series Family Supper, which he developed with his thenpartner Naomi Pomeroy, after which he was awarded a fellowship at the University of Washington’s Graduate School of Communication to focus on scaling up the dinner table project to incorporate a larger audience. Hebb’s current iteration (and recently published book), Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner), is a natural extension of his personal fascination.

In the beginning, it wasn’t obvious to Hebb that death would be the theme of his scalable dinner table concept. First he played around with the idea of a custom dinner table with embedded cameras that would record thought leaders’ conversations for a remote audience, but after several iterations, he realized he wanted participants to take a more active role in the project.

“Ultimately I realized the way to scale the dinner was similar to the way we scaled supper clubs — to give people a set of instructions, almost like a board game, and to let them create their own experience. And that’s when I turned it into the idea of being topic-based.”

Following a conversation with two doctors chancemet on a train, with whom he chatted about the grim statistics of people wanting to die at home vs. the number of people who were actually allowed to do so, Hebb realized that not only was our relationship to the dinner table ripe for revival — so was our relationship to death. He was particularly struck by the way we talk, or rather do not talk, about death in a meaningful way, even with our closest family and friends. These realizations led to the creation of Let’s Have Dinner and Talk about Death, aka Death Over Dinner.

On January 26, 2019 — as part of the first-ever Battery Sparked summit at The Battery — Michael Hebb conducted one of his Death Over Dinner events for an audience of 60 members and their guests. Sparked was part retreat, part conference, allowing members to create connections with themselves, one another, and the community over a day of inspirational programs. Death Over Dinner was a natural fit for the event, and Hebb may bring it to The Battery again in the future.

If you’d like to do it at home, setting up your own dinner party to talk about death is a simple procedure. The online portal deathoverdinner.org asks who you’d like to invite and what you want the focus of your death discussion to be, and then it sends you an invitation letter and links to reading materials and videos that you can send to your guest list to bolster the discussion, as well as a script for the evening. Hebb has organized Death Dinners for as many as 500 people and as few as three. But ultimately, he hopes that folks will take the opportunity to host their own.

“Many of the things I do are designed to be a toolkit for other people to replicate and make their own,” he says. “We’re currently death-illiterate. If we’re able to have these discussions — become literate, feel empowered, have agency — we’ll make better decisions.”

By Nicole Gluckstern