Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

by Stephen Jenkinson

Dying people need to hear and speak a language that does justice and bears faithful witness to how dying is. They deserve that kind of language. It is their right. This isn’t a language of technical information, prognostic probabilities, and survival rates. It is a language in which dying people can recognize the realities of what they have been living covertly, probably for some considerable time before the tests and the office appointment confirmations of the worst-case scenarios. How else are they able to learn to speak as if what is happening is happening? Remember the grown son of the dying woman in the Maritimes, how he asked her to tell him what he didn’t know and what he needed to know? That’s what he was doing, trying to find a language. He was saying to his mother, “Tell me how to say it,” and she was saying to him, “I don’t have any way of saying it.” Without such a language there is no way of turning the corner from “if” to “when,” from “very sick” to “not going to get better,” from “going to die” to “dying.” Without such a language there is no way to have a shared understanding between dying people and those they love. There is no way to be sad together.