Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

by Stephen Jenkinson

“Go home and live as normal a life as possible, under the circumstances.” It’s a recipe for less dying in the face of death. It prescribes seduction as a treatment for anxiety, despair, depression, and terminal agitation. What we want is lucidity (although not too much of it), painlessness, an easy go of it. What is stolen is sorrow, grieving, knowing. That is how less dying is bought, with terminal sedation or with less knowing about dying.

Though well-intended people working in the death trade regularly praise dying people as their greatest teachers, dying people are typically busy trying to figure out how to die, most of them in the undertow of the death-phobic aversions that predominate at dying time. They are not teaching, nor are they trying to teach. The most accomplished among them are struggling with all this. In a death-phobic time and place you cannot as a given learn what dying is or what it asks of us all from their tuition.

Life is that of which the human life span, for a while, partakes.

Life is not a human thing.

It is what gives us the opportunity to be human.

We have religions that sanctify all sentient beings, which is good for the sentient beings they have in mind, but this still ties “life” to having eyelashes or a central nervous system or a pulse. We are denying this quality of sentience to mountains, rivers, the air, the ground, and all that sustains us at our considerable peril and to the demonstrable corruption of the world. We should rather at least consider that mountains, rivers, the air, and the ground are all ways life has of being sentient. The realization and the humbling power of knowing that life is not a human thing could go a long way toward making us human.

so our capacity to kill each other or ourselves is not the natural order of things playing itself out, no matter how common it might be in our history and in the papers, no matter how much we are inured to it or numbed by the horror of it. Instead it is a rupture that will not let life live according to its nature.

When I say “know death well,” I mean that we must know how singular and nonhuman death is, how it is a knowable mystery not much known by our culture, how for all its ubiquity it continues to be dreaded and entered into as separation and loss and a miserable shock. If we are going to do anything more than remind dying people of what they no longer have and can no longer do and what they will never be again, we must know how it is for a man or a woman in the course of the ordinary business of getting dressed or washed to see or feel something they have never seen or felt before, and how it is for them to wait for the doctor’s appointment, and wait for the appointment with the specialist, and for the test results, and to be asked to come to the office because they will not tell the results of the test on the phone, and wait for that appointment. We must know how it is for that man or woman to sit in the chair in the office that countless other people have sat in and have someone take away whatever is left of their frail feeling of well-being with the news that this is not curable, and how it is for them to be rushed then into a technical and encouraging discussion of how it might be operable and treatable, before the news that it is not curable has even cooled enough to take some kind of shape inside them, before it has turned from news into knowledge and from test results into the rest of their life. We must know how it is to stumble out into the daylight with nothing, not ...

And further, we have to know the terrible seduction of dying not having to die, of being inundated with friends and family who cheerlead their loved one into the attitude of health, the positive outlook, the hopeful countenance, who enforce the banishment of any and all who would speak of dying when dying is at hand. We have to know how it is for dying men or women who are not allowed to know they are dying as they die, though throughout they know, how they have to maintain that secret awareness that masquerades as a fear alone, and how their job as someone’s parent or child or spouse now includes not dying, and how not giving up is the only show of love and commitment tolerable to those who love them.

The culture gives us our ways of dying, gives us the meanings and meaninglessnesses we wring from it, forcing upon us the repertoire for dying. I do not use this phrase “to die not dying” to describe a psychological reality or a facet of individual style or psychology. I mean by it the myriad schemes of refusing to die that are this culture’s ur response to dying.

For many of us, much of the time ‘I love you’ means ‘I love how I feel when you do what you do that makes me feel that way.’ The first thing you see with this is that love is something I feel, an inner state of some kind that is mine. Like all feelings, the love feeling would be inconstant.

We say to the person we propose to love, ‘Listen, now. As long as you are as lovable as you are in this magic moment, I’ll love you, no problem.

But even more so, a lot of people love each other based on the shaky assumption that they will hang around long enough to do the loving and the getting loved. Not many go into the love business with the end of that love firmly in mind and in view. Fewer still are those that plan the end of their love. They’ll hesitate if they have any sense that the one they’re trying to love might not be in it for the long haul, or that the deal has changed, or that one of them is heading out of town and out of sight without waiting for the other one to get ready or agree or even be aware that this is what is happening, and must happen, and will.

I have to teach people how to love someone who’s leaving, not someone who’s staying.

And every day my job is to oblige that one who is leaving to do so loving the life they’re leaving behind and everyone they’ve loved in it.

Mostly—and this is one epic achievement of a human being—you will be a faithful witness to the hard truth that it is harder to die now, with all of our medical pain and symptom solutions and psychological technologies and New Age affirmations, than it has ever been.

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...

The pervasive fear of dying in the adult population of North America doesn’t come from seeing more dying as people get older. It comes, partly, from seeing not much dying or much death at all as they get older.

Death phobia is a syndrome at war with culture, and where I work and live it is prevailing.

For most of us in the West, a public expression of pain or confusion is a problem for the listeners or the experts to solve, as if the hurt has an automatic request in it to have the hurting end. I’ve never been persuaded by this, though. You learn from working in the helping trades that hurt has to find its words as well as its voice. Hurt has to speak its name and find a language that does justice to what has been seen and endured. People can hurt well, meaning that they can hurt toward a purpose. They can hurt for some reason or merit beyond how it is to hurt and be hurt. Saying more when you think you’ve said enough is one way to begin the labor.

The origin of the nomad, by this way of thinking, is not in their wandering, but in the eventual choice of some other people to stop wandering.

By remembering all the old stories and by telling them to the young among you, by respectful, sustainable human ways of living, you keep that small part of the world that is your home alive. This is the great ellipse of being human and knowing your obligation to life. In time, you learn what your death will mean. And in a little more time you become one of the ancestors you once nourished. This is the arche of human life, its real foundation. This is the warp and weft of home.

The nomad wanders at home, while the traumatized person flees the loss of home by coping, and coping turns home into feeling homey. Ikea makes a lot of money—a lot of money—from that difference.

Heaven means that this is not your real home. Heaven is anywhere but here.

If heaven really is the place where every needed and longed-for thing resides, then people who are at home are in heaven.

If heaven is where friends and family go when they die, then people who are at home and know where the bones of their dead lay are in heaven.

If not, then heaven is both a creature and a comfort...

You have to sell the idea of homelessness first in order that the need for heaven has some place to roost, in order that it can make a home inside someone.

This history of homelessness, running from the manacle and the man, losing the dead, all explained and compensated for and legitimized by a new religion, this is the foundational history of the thing that was to become Europe. Before the Muslim incursion from the south, this is how Europe was being conjured and converted. Hundreds of years later Europeans fought the Muslims with this homeless religion in hand and then purified southern Europe by reinforcing the religion at the point of the sword and the heat of the cleansing flame. Knowing this is fundamental to being able to answer the doctor’s question about where all our torment about dying came from.

Europeans didn’t migrate or wander or sojourn or gather here. They fled here. They didn’t come to the Americas; they ran from Europe, from the thousand landless, homeless, feudal miseries that together were their days. They ran not so much to give to their children what they never had as to not have to inherit what their parents and grandparents bequeathed to them. This fantasy of energetic, optimistic people seeking the freedom to be their own true selves, freed from the old feudal constraints to prosper and multiply in natural contentment—this is retroactive PR, selling to us a history that never was.

Homeless people fleeing slavery, with little or no capacity for Home, with a homeless story of homelessness at the center of their religion—they made America.

But ask about the one thing that every person will live to see, the one event that no one will miss, the single most constant and trustworthy proposition beside which all others falter, and three-quarters of us seem to draw blanks.

This isn’t a question about what people “know,” in the usual sense of the word. It’s a question about how they live with what is so.

Cultures that are “underdeveloped” in their technologies, buildings, and comfort-securing schemes tend to be highly developed in their mythologies, cosmologies, and understandings about how things work together to make life.

“When you die, that’s it” and “Nobody really knows” both come from the same withered imagination and abandoned capacity for storytelling and myth seeing.

In North America we are living in a time when overt and public acts of worship are rare. People’s ability to speak clearly and deeply about their understanding of the Divine is underdeveloped at the same time that many of us now can manage extravagant articulation regarding the merits of the latest smartphone.

Both God and the Dead know all that we do not. Both God and the Dead are above the fray. Both God and the Dead are austerely, sublimely, perfectly themselves, with no need of us.

How do you feel when you lose your wallet? Inadequate, miserably incompetent, and capable of considerable self-hatred about it all, especially given the exquisite mayhem of trying to cancel and replace everything in it. That is how we feel about losing our wallets. Yet without hesitation, without wonder or challenge or any question at all, without feelings of inadequacy, carelessness, or self-hatred, we lose our dead.

Our fear of dying came into the world before we did. It was conjured every time those we descend from ran, every time they left their capacity for being at home behind, every time they were unable to visit the old bones, every time they forgot where those bones were. It is not universal, but it is a constant in every culture built by waves of calamity-fleeing immigrants who have lost the bones of their dead.

Dying people often said to me, mournfully, about nothing in particular: “I don’t know what to do.”

But a better way of saying what they meant with this lament is: “Something is mostly coming, and it is mostly here too, elbowing everything else out of the way. I don’t know which way to face.”

In the early days of diagnosis a dying person has as his or her new purpose in life to be “anywhere but here,” to know “anything but this,” to go after that fugitive running down the street called My Normal Life. But in the last days there is more often a feeling of “this, and this only.” When older dying parents in their last days or hours mysteriously stop wanting to see or talk to their adult children this makes for a lot of heartache, but what is really happening is that the dying person is distracted by the sorrows and grief and familiarity of the living from the epic project of setting his or her face in some other direction, in a way that finally obeys what is happening. They no longer face those who have come from them, but face instead—or try to face—those from whom they came. That is the instinct, to begin dying toward their beginnings instead of living for what they have begun. But the instinct is hamstrung whe...

Dying people are very often entirely mistaken about what they fear most. It is not the pain. It never was the pain. The more energetic and resilient fear by far that I have seen is the fear that the rest of us, the living, will after some time and adjustment be able to live our lives, that the end of the dying person’s life doesn’t end much else after all, that the living will continue to be the living and be able to proceed as if the dying person is past, done, over, in some way as if that person had never really, enduringly been.

How real can they be if the dead are gone, or lost, or in the past tense? Dying people intuitively begin to understand that their reality is pending, that their citizenship in the land of the living is tenuous and ebbing, that they are even now beginning to join that faceless, nameless caravan of the Lost and the Gone, heading out of town. They can feel it in the strained etiquette of conversations about how they are faring. They see that the living have already made for them a separate place, emotionally and spiritually, to live out their days. They are, with the shadow of their dying upon them, no longer part of the plan We the Living have for ourselves. They are on the Lost Nation highway, even now.

And they begin to recognize and remember, probably for the first time, that when it was their turn and they were the living and they buried friends and grandparents and parents, they were able without much thought or difficulty to get on with their lives, as they say, and start talking about the ones they buried in the past tense. They were able eventually to turn away from the dead and were rewarded for it by being treated by their friends and family as fully recovered, as healed. Our bodies know how to die, but we have little or no idea how anything of us could survive the amnesia that seems built into our history and our memorial practices.

When a person dies in our culture, they take on the same status as the unborn: hypothetical. My wife asks me regularly to stop talking about the dead when I’m teaching. She says I lose credibility instantly when I do, and I imagine she’s right.

The Dying and the Dead, we must, finally, recognize, are the same people, separated by a little time and a little breath. They are the same people. But among We the Living they do not qualify for the same concern, the same attention, the same insistence that they should eat, to keep up their strength. They are gone.

The care of The Dying is the repository of our best technology and our best intent. The care of the Dead, if there is such a thing, is none of our business.

The bluff and the bravado I have heard among The Dying about “Whadd’ya gonna do?” does not hide that fear of disappearing very well. That is the root dread of dying people, as I have come to know it. It is an inherited dread, and it comes from an inherited poverty that is rooted in certain historical experiences of those who were once our people.

Our fear of dying is an inherited trauma. It comes from not knowing how to be at home in the world. It comes from having no root in the world and no indebtedness to what has gone before us.