Elizabeth McCafferty is a 29-year-old actress-turned-journalist based in Rochester, New York. She was inspired to join an informal discussion on death and dying at a local Buddhist center in south London. This uncommon experience is called a “death cafe.” It inspires honest discussion about death and dying while examining death’s powerful influence on our daily lives. For McCafferty, this meeting would prove a watershed moment. It challenged her to reassess her goals and rethink what success looks like for her.
Prior to her dramatic shift into journalism, McCafferty had an accomplished career as an actress, featuring in many of America’s best-known television series. For all her accolades and accomplishments, she lived in constant fear when she didn’t have the next engagement set up. She experienced the deep weight of needing to consistently get acting jobs. This chronic stress developed into a self-feeding loop that robbed her happiness from living.
Shifting into the world of journalism, McCafferty was soon a published author, discovering her writing voice seemingly overnight. Her old demons reemerged as she began to quantify her achievement. She didn’t think about quality — in fact she did the opposite. To the end, she was a difficult self-critic, eternally judging herself against other writers. Whenever she sensed she was falling short of their success, she was flooded with disappointment.
In her newfound race for approval, McCafferty had formed the habit of obsessing over checkmarks. She poured herself into elaborate tasks, such as spending eight hours crafting a perfect birthday cake for a friend, only to feel utterly exhausted by the time the celebration arrived. This cycle of behavior left her feeling shameful. Suddenly it dawned on her that some of the greatest years of her life, as everybody likes to say, were passing her by.
Attending the death cafe helped McCafferty see things differently. For Daisy, though, the experience was all-consuming as she became engulfed by the emotional sea of others’ stories of sickness and death. The visual of those parents mourning for the children they lost broke her heart. Their stories stuck with her, changing her perception of the world and what life is about.
During the discussions, one older participant shared a poignant insight: “The journey is the best bit.” This remark stuck with McCafferty, inspiring her to reflect on the merit of experience as opposed to success. She understood that her never-ending competition and obsession with success had dimmed the joy of being present and going with the flow.
Through these discussions about death and dying, McCafferty realized that she was forced to face her own fears and insecurities. So, instead of fearing death, it seemed that welcoming death is actually the path toward living a more meaningful life. The death cafe provided a space for vulnerability and reflection, allowing attendees to acknowledge their own struggles while finding shared humanity among one another.