Die Wise

A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

By: Stephen Jenkinson

Narrated by: Stephen Jenkinson

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. 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

Critic reviews

“Stephen Jenkinson’s elegant and sorrow-freighted book brings prophetic insight rather than pastoral affirmations. 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. Stay with it, hold the sorrow as the gift it is, savor in small, immense chunks. Every word is an invitation to trade fantasy for imagination. There isn’t a book like it.”
—Dr. Martin Shaw, author of Snowy Tower: Parzival and the Wet, Black Branch of Language

An opportunity of a lifetime

Steven Jenkinson offers a dreamscape of possibility about how to approach our mortality by living a life of breathtaking authenticity. I am staggered by the potential and humbled in the face of accepting whatever this life offers as the miracle it can be and actually is. So grateful I went on this search to find meaning in the deaths I have witnessed only to find my own staring me back in the face.

Once in a generation

One of the most important books in the world right now, brilliantly performed by the author.

Hard but incredibly valuable read.

This man’s words are soothing and mesmerizing. If you are interested in how you or someone you care about can die well, with less fear and more purpose, this is the book for you. At times it can be really hard to listen to (for example: the very sad but real fact of the death of children) but every word is spoken with compassion and honesty. We aren’t doing ourselves any favors by pretending these inevitabilities won’t come to pass. Highly recommend this book.

Invitation

This book was a great invitation for me to look at death as something not to be afraid of but rather something to keep sacred. To be revered.

Poignant and important

Stephens voice and telling are like a salve to the heart. It makes this broken culture make some sense. Read this book to know how to hold someone hand and for yourself. I’m recommending to everyone I know.