Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

by Stephen Jenkinson

That is the job: to know death well and to be useful when it comes. And that is what an eight-year-old dying girl sitting up in her temporary hospital bed just before midnight looking out the window on the darkening world deserves. She deserves a faithful witness. Yes, she deserves the truth. The truth is that she is dying in a death-phobic culture that doesn’t believe in what is happening to her. The truth is that just about everyone around her doesn’t believe that her dying is a part of the natural order of things or that life includes her eight-year-old death. The truth is that everyone knows what is causing her to die, and no one knows why she is dying. The truth is that almost no one will know what to do with her and for her in the months and years after her death, that almost no one will imagine that she would need anything from any of them. The truth is that almost no one knows how to talk to her, nor does almost anyone know how to answer the question she asks, sitting up in bed minutes before midnight. And the truth she most deserves from the older people around her is that all of this can be different, that it must be different. The truth that she most deserves is not that it is her birthright to live to seventy-eight years and a few months, nor to be free of loneliness or pain, but that it was her birthright to have been born into a sane culture that knows how to care for her now not as if she will be around for decades, but for months. She deserves a few trustwo...