Die Wise

A potentially life-changing book for anyone wanting to experience grief and death in a more meaningful way. Grounded in the author's experiences with hundreds of dying people and their families, the book advocates a bold engagement with a part of the human experience that is often more endured than lived. In its own unique way, Die Wise is more about living than dying.

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 centre of the page and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise 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 not a lifestyle option. It is a moral, political, and spiritual obligation each person owes their ancestors and their heirs. Die Wise dreams such a dream and plots such an uprising. How we die, how we care for dying people, and how we carry our dead—this work makes our capacity for a village-mindedness, or breaks it.

Table of Contents

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