Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the page and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. DieWise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well. Die Wise is for those who will fail to live forever.

Dying well, Jenkinson writes, is a right and responsibility of everyone. It is a moral, political, and spiritual obligation each person owes their ancestors and their heirs. It is not a lifestyle option. It is a birthright and a debt.

Dying well nails you to the wheel of the world. It binds you to your people, to your ancestry and to those who will come after you. Dying well loves life. How we die, and how we care for dying people, and how we carry the dead: Taken all together, this work makes our village life or breaks it.

Contents:

• The Ordeal of a Managed Death
• Stealing Meaning from Dying
• The Tyrant Hope
• The Quality of Life
• Yes, But Not Like This (euthanasia and suicide)
• The Work
• So Who Are the Dying to You?
• Dying Facing Home
• What Dying Asks of Us All
• Kids
• Ah, My Friend the Enemy

Dying wise whispers to those terrified and depressed by a terminal diagnosis—those with and without a religion—that there is such a thing as dying wisely and well, that it can be done.

In the end, Jenkinson's message is not one of despair—he believes learning to love death is in fact one of the most direct ways to love life.

“A true story-man, Jenkinson paints image after image on the cave wall of his parchment. Die Wise is a formidable body of work, road-tested in ways most of us hope never to know about.” —Martin Shaw, author of Snowy Tower: Parzival and the Wet, Black Branch of Language

Stephen Jenkinson is founder of the Orphan Wisdom School in Canada and subject of the documentary film Griefwalker.