Facing my mother’s third cancer diagnosis, could Bangkok’s ‘death awareness café’ help me grapple with the uncertainty of life?

Back home in Melbourne, Mum has liver cancer for the third time. I have an anxiety disorder.

Eight days into Bangkok, I’m in a Muay Thai boxing gym where Saenchai has me by the neck. Things are going beautifully.

My first jab enjoys a brief but meaningful life. Saenchai slips forward and locks me into a clinch. My face squashes against his shoulder. Sweat stings my eyes. Hips in, I try to stand tall, cycling through escapes that usually work on people who aren’t among the greatest Muay Thai fighters alive. My feet lose contact with the mat. Gravity has joined Saenchai’s corner.

He laughs. I laugh. I started Thai boxing in 2023 and this is my seventh Muay Thai drop-in—violence has become my wellness practice. A small Buddha watches from the corner of the gym, hopefully withholding judgment. Anxiety likes the future, but a fist coming toward your face is present-tense.

I spent my childhood flicking through family photo albums. My two brothers and I grew into the frame while my parents shrank. Mum’s hair changed. Dad’s belly arrived. I’d count the years between photos, then beyond them. Would they be there when I was 30? 40? 50? The pages ran out before my questions did.

At school camp, I’d lie awake in my bunk. Please don’t let anything happen to Mum and Dad while I’m away. I’ll get an A on my next test. I’ll eat Mum’s congee, a culinary miracle of no flavor and too much fish, in under three hours. I’ll even apologize for shredding my brother’s coloring book. Never mind what he did to my kite. I was eight and already bribing death.

As an adult, I trade imagined disasters for immediate ones, five days a week. Someone knees me in the liver. My world is the next three seconds. Then Mum’s cancer returned and the next three seconds stopped being enough. I’d spent decades afraid she would die—now, doctors were discussing how to keep her alive.

The Elder exhibit rushes me through the decades. A gray wig, clouded glasses, a weighted vest, sandbags at my wrists and ankles. I shuffle across the room, older, as everything becomes annoyingly, administratively difficult.

Bangkok was already booked. The city prescribes exposure therapy. My first dose: The Kid Mai Death Awareness Café, next to a horror escape room. Every few minutes, someone screams like their browser history is being judged at the pearly gates. My existential crisis comes with surround sound.

Buddhist philosopher Veeranut Rojanaprapa studies death. He opened the café in 2018 as fieldwork for his PhD. Thailand is 90 percent Buddhist. Could thinking about death make a whole country less greedy, less angry, less corrupt? His theory is simple: Remember you’re dying. Try not to be an asshole.

Neighbors objected to the coffin deliveries. Nothing says new café like a shipment of caskets.

Veeranut was delighted. “I love all of the complaints. Because if they are complaining, it means they are thinking about death, they are aware of death.”

Enlightenment isn’t everyone’s priority. The coffin selfie is.

“Some people want to see if the coffin is comfortable,” the receptionist says. “Others are scared of death. They want to understand. When they get inside the coffin, they think, ‘One day I will be here alone.’ Then they have many emotions. Maybe they can make peace with death.”

She points me to the four rooms. Birth, Elder, Pain, Death.

Red wombs bulge from the walls of the Birth exhibit. I crawl inside one and assume the fetal position. Normally, my spiraling gets me there for free.

Three days ago, I ate at Cabbages & Condoms, founded by Thai activist Mechai Viravaidya, who decided condoms needed the reputation of a vegetable. When Thailand’s HIV epidemic hit, he took condoms where condoms had rarely gone before: Taxis, traffic police and Buddhist monks. New HIV cases fell by around 90 percent, an estimated 7.7 million infections.

At the restaurant, no surface is safe from safe sex. Lamps. Walls. A life-size Santa Claus with condoms dangling from his beard, the filthy little Christmas miracle he is. Everything except the food.

I’ve gone from contraception to conception. Menopause is one room away.

In my early 20s, Mum appeared at my bedroom door holding a bag of sanitary products. “I don’t need these anymore.”

“Oh, OK.” I accepted the stash. “Thanks.”

I didn’t register that Mum was marking an ending. I don’t know if she wanted me to ask. I didn’t. I still haven’t.

At my bedroom door, Mum was already negotiating with a body that had stopped consulting her. She gave me what she no longer needed, then went outside to put chicken in the sun. Mum believes sunlight kills germs. I want to go back and keep her in my doorway longer. I want to ask: “Mum, was it hard?”

But I was full of beginnings, and she held the door open from the other side. The Elder exhibit rushes me through the decades. A gray wig, clouded glasses, a weighted vest, sandbags at my wrists and ankles. I shuffle across the room, older, as everything becomes annoyingly, administratively difficult.

In the Pain exhibit, I change into a surgical gown and commit to ICU cosplay. Monitors crowd in, beeping on a 30-second loop. The mattress crackles under plastic. An IV bag hangs beside my head, taped shut and empty.

I’m the only one treating mortality as a catastrophe best prevented through sufficient worrying. Reincarnation. Afterlife. Nothing at all. I’m agnostic and won’t find out in time. Impermanence doesn’t require belief.

Playing critically ill is disturbingly entertaining. The secret: Don’t ever actually need intensive care. Mum never got to play. Yesterday, beneath the gilded spires of the Grand Palace, I texted her: “How did the second treatment go? Any side effects?”

“Fine. I’m very tough, you know.”

She added a flexed-bicep emoji. I needed “fine” to be true.

Two months later, I’ll learn she couldn’t keep food down. She landed in emergency. Of course she didn’t tell me. Cancer hadn’t stopped her being my mum, protecting me from the scary parts. My hospital stay ends in 10 minutes. Mum’s lasted four days.

A wooden coffin waits in the Death exhibit. The assignment: Climb in and decide what deserves my last day. A black book by the exit demands an answer. I lower myself inside. The lid closes. Pitch black.

Maybe playing dead in a Buddhist country while Mum lies in a real hospital bed is bad karma. My fingers curl beneath the edge of the lid. I don’t lift.

Mum will die. I will die. Everyone I love will leave me. My anxiety will remain in excellent health.

I want my mum. I take more photos of her than I used to. I’m already collecting them for after. The coffin exorcises nothing but three minutes from my afternoon. I lift the lid and pick up the pen. Don’t spend today grieving tomorrow.

At Pak Khlong Talat flower market, women sit on the concrete, threading jasmine into garlands. The hands change. The knots remember them.

Since 1976, Mother’s Day in Thailand has smelled like jasmine. White for a mother’s heart. Chosen over showier blooms because jasmine asks for nothing and is always there.

Mum wants grandchildren. Her oncologist knows. My brother declines to comment. Mum has sources. I’m sources. I forward her a photo of my brother’s upcoming date.

“She looks plastic,” Mum texts. Then again, for emphasis.

I buy a garland. Her hands are too far away. I carry the jasmine back through the Old Town anyway. The flowers brown overnight. My hands hold the scent for days.

At Wat Pho, death is 151 feet long and covered in gold. The Reclining Buddha is entering nirvana. He’s been at it since 1832. Coins clink into 108 bronze bowls. Outside, tuk-tuks wait and Singhas are cold.

I’m the only one treating mortality as a catastrophe best prevented through sufficient worrying. Reincarnation. Afterlife. Nothing at all. I’m agnostic and won’t find out in time. Impermanence doesn’t require belief.

Bangkok hasn’t turned my neuroses into wisdom. I remain attached to everyone staying alive. But scared and silent aren’t the same.

Mum has spent my life standing between me and whatever might hurt. I’ve let her. The truths she once kept outside my bedroom door don’t have to stay there. I slip my shoes back on, sit on the steps, and tap her name. She picks up after the second ring.

“Mum,” I say. “Was it hard?”

****

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