Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

by Stephen Jenkinson

Tell your spouse how it is to be inexplicably dying. If no one on the professional end has had the courage to tell you what is happening, then you be the one who decides what is happening. Then, faithfully report on your ebbing days, the sway of the disease, the unfamiliar absence of energy. Tell your spouse everything he or she doesn’t want to know or hear, and don’t wait to be asked, and don’t aim for acceptance or comfort. Aim at this: I’m going to give you something of your death now, through mine, so you’ll have something reliable when you get there, something of me. Let me love you that way. And if you’re the one people will designate as “the survivor,” the one who’ll write the obituary, you’ll have the harder road, friend. Always on the receiving end of news, status changes, test results, you will have to decide that you are in the time of dying, whether your spouse gets it or not, whether they agree or not. Here’s what you’ll have to say, more than once, to plant both of you in the time you’re in: “I don’t want to be too lonely before I have to be. I’m not going to sit with all this by myself waiting for you to be ready to talk about it. So, here goes. Tell me please what you think about when you look off into the distance, turned entirely inward. Likely I won’t have someone to ask me these things when it’s my turn. Tell me please, what is it to be dying? What should I learn now, to help me when it’s my turn?”