Die Wise: Dying and Living, Love and Loss

Course Description

Stephen Jenkinson is a tough and tender guide through hard terrain. He is the author of the award-winning book “Die Wise – A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul”. The book is based on his many years of service in the trenches of palliative care.

In the first two classes of this course Jenkinsen takes a redemptive and demanding look at grief, love of life and dying. In the third session he approaches the making of elders and our need for willing stewards of the planet.

Jenkinson does not offer a program of steps or generic advice to conquer fear and death. He does not sell eldership initiation diplomas. He values following the natural ways of life over helping people feel better about themselves. He shows us how stepping out of our compulsion for comfort, into the realities of grief and limitation, can lead us to a real participation in life and love.

Jenkinson’s voice in our modern wilderness calls us to witness, feel and attend to something lost and yet still present. We must discern that for ourselves. Listen to some of Stephen’s refrains and see if you are called to learn to die wisely:

“Grief is the natural order of things.”

“Growth for its own sake is oncological, sociopathic.”

This course is ideal if

• You want to take an honest, close-up look at death and dying in our time.
• You’re interested in learning and wonder more than knowledge.
• You want a wise companion to help you through dying and living, love and loss.

Course Overview

Session One: Grief/Eloquence

In the same way that love is a skill, grief is a skill. It has a repertoire, it has its languages. Grief is the radical etiquette of citizenship in a death phobic/grief illiterate time and place.

Session Two:  Sanity/Soul

Dying is not the end of wisdom, and wisdom is not exhausted by dying. Dying well is a spiritual obligation, and a moral obligation. If you love somebody, if you care about the world that’s to come after you, if you want somebody to be spared the lunacy of what you’ve seen, you’ve got to die wise. How you die is the proving ground, the cradle and the grave for every conviction you have about justice and mercy, about life’s meanings, about what love is for.

Session Three:  Come of Age: Elderhood’s Spirit Work

We are awash in aged-ness. No generation has ever been older, longer. If experience was wisdom … Turns out, it isn’t. We have generational fault lines as menacing as anything tectonic. Old people are looking for the certification of elderhood. Young people are claiming each other as elders.  

Elderhood isn’t a personality type. The work of elderhood is dictated by the troubles of the times. Elders are the end of ‘be all you can be’.

 

By the end of this course you will

• Be readier to care for what you love.
• Have more courage to say “enough”  to trying to not die when the time of dying is upon us.
• Be more skilled in heartbreak.