The organizers of Vashon’s former Death Café gatherings have refocused their efforts into a new group that will meet this Saturday to hold informal discussions about mortality called “Let’s Talk About Living and Dying.”

The meeting, a program of the Vashon Conversation for the Living about Dying, will include occasional speakers, book reviews, local resources, refreshments and lively conversations, according to Susan Pitiger, who originally founded the Death Café meetings on Vashon with her husband several years ago.

“It’s so rich, sitting and talking about death. It is such a rich topic, and so many of us don’t even want to touch it, much less talk about it, and it’s so freeing. It just frees your soul when you do start to talk about it because it makes it less scary,” said Pitiger.

Jane Neubauer, co-facilitator, said that interest in the community for the kind of setting she and Pitiger want to create now have led to this moment.

“Some of the people who came regularly asked that we open the agenda up a bit and have some speakers and do different things,” said Neubauer. “This group is an informal conversation group, not focused on finishing end-of-life paperwork or anything like that, but just talking about experiences related to end of life and dying, and experiences of living and dying every day.”

Neubauer, a registered nurse, has been observant of attitudes surrounding death as they have evolved with changing times and priorities. The taboo subject, she said, has begun to open up worldwide as well as in America.

“There are people taking some pretty alternative approaches to death and dying in terms of keeping people at home a lot more, and having different approaches to what we think of as the traditional funeral,” she said.

As for who is participating in those sometimes difficult conversations, Neubauer believes the uninitiated may be surprised to find members of their own peer group equally curious about the end, such as those navigating parenthood with older relatives who they provide care for.

“They are raising children and now they are needing to think about their parents who might be becoming more infirm, or who are facing terminal illness, who maybe need to think about this time,” she said. “Twenty-somethings are very curious about some of these issues and we welcome them also.”

Pitiger believes an open mind is a powerful thing.

“[The group is] for people who are curious, and it’s not for someone who immediately says, ‘no, I don’t want to talk about it.’ It’s not the venue for someone who has a knee-jerk reaction. If you’re curious and you’re experiencing your mortality in one way or another, it’s an excellent place to bring that.”

“In this group, it can be a little bit of everybody. I like that, I like when it’s kind of a cross-generational conversation,” said Neubauer.

Neubauer added that while other motivations for attending the discussion can range, there is something for everyone.

“People come for very different reasons,” she said. “We’ve had kind of 30 to 40 year olds because it’s been on their minds for some reason, and they want to talk about it more. We’ve had people with some kind of terminal diagnosis and they’re trying to come to terms with it. We’ve had people who’ve lost someone and they want another objective place to talk about it other than their family. And we’ve had people who deal with it in their work.”

Dropping in, visitors will be placed in groups of 4-6 to have guided talks about a number of topics, though Neubauer emphasized that there is no agenda and speakers would be limited to 10 or 15 minutes so there was enough time.

“We want to stay focused mainly on the 90 minutes that we have on the people coming to talk, and others to listen,” she said.

The new “Let’s Talk about Living and Dying” group will meet at Vashon Intuitive Arts on Saturday from 3 to 4:30 p.m.

— Paul Rowley