If you're going to talk about a subject most people don't want to talk about, why not do so over tea and cake and cookies?
Why not gather in a sunny living room looking out on a lush tangle of green, where you can watch the breeze ruffle the leaves on the trees as you eat forkfuls of blueberry tart?
Death comes to each of us, to everyone we love. Couldn't talking about it in a safe, comfy setting make the prospect less frightening?
This is what Betsy Trapasso thinks. This is why she's asked friends to come — why on a Sunday afternoon, they've braved Topanga Canyon's twists and turns and climbed the dozens of wooden steps to her end-of-a-rural-road front door.
Together, they will make history at Los Angeles' first Death Cafe.
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Ever since a fellow named Jon Underwood held his first Death Cafe a year and a half ago in the basement of his London home, they've been popping up all over the globe.
His website lists numerous U.S. outcroppings — in Gig Harbor, Wash., and Searsport, Me.; in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Cleveland.
There's no agenda. No profit motive. No point of view beyond broad notions: that death deserves discourse, and that facing it without angst can help people live their lives more fully.
"It's not a support group. It's not a grief group," Trapasso says. "My whole thing is to get people talking about it so they're not afraid when the time comes."
To her house come an eclectic bunch, including a graphic artist, a psychologist, a film director, an LAPD sergeant and an actor/producer who wishes to remain anonymous and carries his white Maltese, Blossom, in his shoulder bag.
They gather in a loose circle — on a couch, in chairs, on the floor.
Trapasso is lithe, with flowing brown hair, a moon face and large, intense blue eyes. When she was a baby, those eyes won her the nickname "Spooky," which stuck.
With those eyes, her friends say, the end-of-life guide is able to ease people's last moments on Earth.
Because this is Topanga, Trapasso bangs a drum to begin the discussion. Then she passes around a vial of lavender oil and asks people to breathe it in deeply and relax.
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Death makes people nervous. Trapasso understands this.
But death has been her life.
The first U.S. hospice, she tells her friends, came to her hometown of Branford, Conn., in 1974. Her grandfather, as mayor, pushed for it and took Trapasso to meetings.
She came west to USC to get her master's in social work. After graduating, with a Thomas Guide in her lap, she learned Los Angeles — "every neighborhood and every culture and every race, the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor"— by bringing comfort to the dying as a hospice social worker.
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