Laura Cleminson wanted to embrace the inevitable — while forgoing morbidity. So the New Hampshire entrepreneur founded the Pre-Dead Social Club, an open and free group that meets regularly in Brattleboro and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
The club — which Cleminson conceived after the death of her mother — is on a mission to help facilitate vital conversations about death and dying.
Recently, Vermont Public's Mary Williams Engisch spoke to Cleminson about the club's origins and what takes place at the group's monthly meetings, called "Die-A-Logues." This piece was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Mary Williams Engisch: Can you take us back to the club's beginnings?
Laura Cleminson: My mom, nine years ago, was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. She lived for about nine months after her diagnosis, and we all rallied around her. And she was the first person in our family, if you can believe this, that lingered. Everybody else died instantly.
So this was the first time that we had the opportunity to support somebody through a dying process. Fast forward a couple years past that, my dad's health started to change, and neither of them wanted to talk about anything to do with end of life. And I'm thinking we just had this amazing lesson given to us by this woman who we all love. I was kind of surprised like, wow, we're all handling this really differently.
So I started the Pre-Dead Social Club as a way to find other people who were perhaps willing and able to talk about this. And that was two years ago. Since then, we've had close to 600 people tap into what we're doing. It is just growing from that point.
Mary Williams Engisch: You had mentioned, too, that you sort of learned that your mom was almost practicing and learning about death with her friends. Can you talk a bit more about some of those discoveries when you were caring for your mom, and how did that inform the Pre-Dead Social Club?
Laura Cleminson: My mom was very open to talking about anything about mortality after her diagnosis. After she died, my dad said, "Here are a bunch of things that are your Mom's. This is part of her library." And she had a ton of books on death and dying and grief and mortality. And I also know that she would meet with this group of women over 20 years, they would go and retreat together. But she had been working on this understanding and getting comfortable with it, I would say, probably all of her adult life.
Mary Williams Engisch: There's an event on Sunday in Brattleboro called the "Die-A-Logue." Share what that is, and describe what kind of community turns out.
Laura Cleminson: Death Over Drinks is where we invite you to come and talk about death, but you don't have to drink. And there's about 35 people that we have capacity for. And it's a facilitated event, so that we have about five facilitators that will be there.
It is not a grief session, but we take one topic that we give people a dialogue-starter to talk about. It could be, "What weighs more on you, the event of your death or the process of dying?" And everybody around your group will reflect on that.
So stories leave the Death Over Drinks as little wingmen, like you might have somebody that you really want to have these conversations with, and now you can talk about a story that you heard to see if that can spark a conversation as a way in to have more in-depth conversations.
People start getting to know more people in their community on a consistent basis that are willing and able and curious to expand how they think and how they can navigate the thing that we have in common.
Mary Williams Engisch: Death can be this daunting topic that many actively try to avoid talking about. Why should people maybe set aside some fears and talk about death and dying?
Laura Cleminson: These conversations are a marathon. This is not just one and done. We evolve as people over time and the more we're comfortable just kind of picking away at the topics, the more we are able to lay this foundation down for when we need to, when we're called upon to support somebody who now is in that life-limiting or terminal diagnosis. And this won't be us having these conversations for the first time when we're our most stressed and we feel our worst. And we're actually having them with people that we love and we care about, not just our medical providers.
The more we talk about it, the more limber we get, and the more confidence and clarity. I think that's a great reason to start picking away at this. And the thing is, if you start picking away, you can enter where you're comfortable, not where you're required based upon a diagnosis.
Local ceramic artist Shari Zabriskie and Ariel Brugger, a palliative care physician assistant, brought Death Over Drinks: A Die-A-Logue to the Brattleboro-area. There's an event Sunday, Jan. 12. The free event is full with a waitlist.
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