COURTESY OF LAURA SWEET
LET’S TALK
ABOUT DEATH
fully, the way we need to shift our
thinking is through a grassroots
movement like this,” said Dianne
Gray, president of the Scottsdale,
Ariz.-based Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Foundation, which teamed with
Hebb to promote the dinners. The
date, Aug. 24, was deliberate: It
was the anniversary of the 2004
death of Kübler-Ross, a SwissAmerican psychiatrist revered as a
pioneer in the study of death and
for coining the five stages of grief.
“We want to give people an in-
HUFFINGTON
09.29.13
teresting, exciting, maybe slightly
sexy or attractive way to have this
conversation,” said Hebb, who
asked participants to start the
meals with a toast and 20-second
remembrance about someone in
their lives who has died. “We often put forward this myth that we
don’t want to talk about death,
but I think we just haven’t gotten
the right invitations.”
Hebb commissioned an interactive website to be created for
dinner hosts to use in planning
the meals. After a person answers
questions about who they will
invite and their reasons for host-
Sweet was
among the
hundreds
of people
in more
than 300
cities that
coordinated
Death Over
Dinner events
on Aug. 24,
2013.