Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

by Stephen Jenkinson

The only qualification for adulthood in this culture seems to be living long enough to get there. The things we think of as “rites of passage” are mostly empty, sentimental, and nostalgic gestures, because no one believes that they make anything of the young person. They are rubber stamps, not alchemy. The teenagers don’t ask for the rites of passage and don’t seem to need them any more than the culture seems to need the teenagers. The events of excess are a reward for getting there, nothing more.

Uninitiated young people look the part of human beings, to some degree, but they are capable of treachery, self-harm, and intoxicating self-absorption in the name of a self-appointed and unguided search for “personal identity.” Without the endorsement and support of the culture, which could come to them through elder-directed ceremony, the unformed yearning for love turns into a cruder, more inarticulate, and camouflaged stumble in the direction of intensity of all kinds.

Managing adolescents in our part of the world is mostly a conspiracy to keep dying at a distance, in deference to being “in the prime of life” or in the name of “having your whole life ahead of you,” by making what they call now “good decisions for yourself.” No one says, “You have your whole death ahead of you.” Almost no one can make any sense of it that helps. The kids are on their own, ducking parents’ fears about what they are exposed to every day and text messaging each other about another friend who went all the way. This culture can’t decide when a person becomes a living thing—that is what the abortion debates show, where the preference is for the term “viable fetus”—but it has no hesitation announcing that everyone is human once they make it here, and adult once they can pay their own bills.

Most adolescents you know have some kind of at least passing fascination with death and suicide.

I’m pretty sure it is a sign of a yearning for some kind of initiatory event, some kind of purposeful intensity, some visitation from the Other World.

Thinking about suicide is a way of conjuring death without waiting for disease to get you there.

By that time kids have tasted the finitude and finality that mingles with their hormones. They’re telling everyone, in hopes that somebody in the know will corroborate their fugitive hope that it is all worth it, that it can be done, that life can be lived, that things not lasting forever isn’t the same thing as everything being meaningless.

No kid, intact culture or not, wants their childhood to end, not really. It has to be taken from them. Real tutelage is, without them ever saying so, what their lives are asking for. Being fascinated with death is how they ask for it.

The character lines in your face are etched there by life, and your personal character was etched upon you primarily by the parenting you were subject to. This belief is written into the language we use, and so into us.

they believe that children have no capacity to grasp the concepts of permanence and end. They believe that they know their child best and that they know what is best for them. Taken together these are arguments for allowing the parents to be the ones who, having done nothing like this before in their lives, guide what dying will be like for a child who does not know, or doesn’t seem to know, or who won’t let on that they know they are dying.

the end of childhood is the beginning of personhood, and that childhood ends with a deliberate, purposeful, choreographed, culturally endorsed exposure to death. That is the meaning that initiation gives to death: It is the beginning of the life you seek, and it kicks in just when you want to begin taking up a place in the world and when you want to lose yourself in someone else. What is true is that you will die. It has always been true, but initiation turns dying from a feared thing into a known thing. This is the sanest reversal imaginable of our insistence that knowing you will die is the thing that will traumatize you and cause you suffering.

imagine how it all could be among us if we began to understand all the talk about dying and the news about dying and the visits to the hospital and the deathbed and the grave side and the memorial service, and all the sorrows and grief of life, as our initiation into personhood. We could change it from trauma and loss and therapy and depression into tempering and emotional intelligence and spiritual maturity and wisdom. We could make our way of dying into our way of person making. Every death that precedes our own could be our school, our initiation hut, every dying person and every witness our fierce teacher. Our own death could be that for everyone who attends it and hears about it, if it is messy enough to give everybody lots to do.

For that to happen we have to begin understanding our dying as an obligation we have to the people around us. If that happens we will change what dying means and what dying does to us. When that happens, dying isn’t an intrusion into the natural order of true things. It is the natural order of things. It is life’s way of gathering you to itself, making sure you aren’t left on your own. Dying isn’t the end of true things—which is what most people mean when they grudgingly admit that dying is part of life—or the euchre of true things. It is one of the true things, that is all. One of the eternal verities, an obligation we have to the life that has been given to us. When dying is understood as justice, mercy, a sign of the compassion that is stitched into the fabric of life itself, that understanding is a midwife that can bring us into a world-loving, community-serving love of life. That is its power.

The news of our dying is the initiation into life that we...

imagine being a kid in that crowd, hearing all that. The old man’s act of hard-earned faith in the way things are, his willingness for his life to be gathered up into Life, all during his life and at the hour of his death, his willingness to really die so his people could live, just as the corn in his field does, is the best teaching there can be on what it looks like for someone to be at home, living something that to him looks a lot like Heaven, making his dying mean something to the faithful witnesses around him, without rancor or argument, without having just visited the world. If heroism it is, then his heroism is the kind that has no enemy and no fight. Instead, his way of loving his culture was to hold himself out to it in service by loving his life and by insisting that his way of dying serves life too.

our lives are made of, endings of all kinds,

And that’s how it ends as I recall, you knowing that his life was suddenly full enough and good enough, that it didn’t have to last forever to be worth living.

Then he turned and looked at me the way he could look, some kind of epic understanding sweeping through his eyes, and this is what he said: “My heart is broken. I never want it to mend.”

Blue was praying for a broken heart. I have never heard anyone do that, not before and not since. Most everyone prays for their heart to mend, to get on with their lives, to have no broken heart at all, a grief-free or grief-contained life. He was praying for what almost no one else wants.

how so many of us believe in amnesia, how getting over hard things is so much like forgetting them. He

So he was willing to know sorrow, that older brother of love, and he prayed for it, so that no passage of time would heal over his memory and his ability to love how life is. He was my first teacher and still the most able in the skill of broken heartedness.

These movies are an indictment of our way of pathologizing and counseling grief. They are an indictment of our comfort seeking and our addiction to competence and mastery. They are a resolute lament over our continuing reluctance and inability to carry our dead with us through our days, to even imagine that such a thing is possible, or necessary. They are a way of engineering our legacy when the chances of us having much of one at all are sketchy. The truth is that we cannot, nor should we be able to, choreograph the way in which we will be remembered, if we will be remembered at all. We can try, and we do, but we cannot die getting remembered. The consequence of doing so is to bequeath to those after us a legacy of fear, faceless anonymity, and terminal futility that will hatch out into another generation of dying miserably when the time comes for them.

Where do you think we got our fear of disappearing from? We got it from those who feared disappearing as they died.

Dying people must stop dying trying to be remembered and begin to die remembering.

How you die has enormous consequence that ripples out from your dying time, that doesn’t end when your life ends.

Is grief something that happens to you, or is grief something you do?

Grief has to be learned, which means it has to be taught. Which means it is possible not to learn it. When we keep insisting on grief being a feeling, or a process that needs management and closure, we are talking about grief as an affliction, the same way we talk about dying. But something changes when we start seeing grief as a skill that needs learning, which is what it is. As a culture we are grief-impaired not because we don’t have what we need to feel bad, but because we are grief-illiterate. We aren’t taught to grieve; we are taught to handle grief, to resolve grief, to get on the other side of it. We need grief teachers and practitioners, not grief counselors, until the day dawns when they’ve become the same thing.

What the potted plant is willing to teach us is that every living thing needs something to die in order to live.

In the case of humans, and hugely in the case of urban North Americans, we need scores of things to die every minute in order for us and our way of life to keep on going. It’s the same for vegans and vegetarians, pretty much. Life doesn’t feed on life. Life doesn’t nourish life. Death feeds life. Every rooted thing knows that and proceeds accordingly. Death is the life-giving thing. That is the proposition that life offers, that grief endorses. Everything dear to you will perish so that life might continue. Our deaths can, in every sense the word can be meant, feed life—unless we refuse to die, or fight dying, or curse dying, or spend all our dying time not dying.

Every person exposed to that refusal begins to feel the pangs of not being nourished, which turn into fear or entitlement. Every person who hears another story of deathbed misery and torment begins to starve a little. Every child who is kept from the graveside is starving for a story of how life is, and why, and whether that is just. Instead they get the saccharine drip of blanket reassurance or the empty calories of platitude and metaphor.

When you don’t let dying change how you live together, whatever the motivation, the consequence is missed last chances for authentic talk between you, shared sorrow, teaching, learning how to live as if what is happening is happening. That loss endures and compounds. Everyone is the poorer for it, and it doesn’t end with the funeral or the distribution of the estate among the beneficiaries.

Our job is not to break it. That is the job of the world, which knows very well how to break it. Our job is to be willing to have it broken and to learn to live that way. Our job is to make a little hole in the field of our days with an old digging stick, to ask the heart-shaped desires we have for our lives to die, to lose sight of them, and to learn to recognize the new life tendril that has cleared the surface sometime after we forget where that heart-shaped thing went into the ground. Simple.

The sheath that was the heart-shaped thing is brown and withered. It’s one half is our sorrowing realization that life asks, nudges, sometimes forces the heart of each living thing to break, so that life can live.

It is the grief that grows from giving in to the greater understanding that life is bigger in every way than the human life span, and must be. The other half is the awe and the love of life that begin to stir in us, born from seeing that this has all been going on without us knowing it, feeding us the whole time, waiting for us to come to this understanding and to take our place in the story and to keep up our end. Keeping up our end means awakening to the obligation we have to all that has given us life, to all that has lived and died before us. With it all comes an unbidden understanding that each of us is incalculably, inextinguishably obligated to life for our life, and that this is a debt that we cannot and should not be able to repay. It will always be so.

By learning what you meant to them while you remember all those who until now have been unremembered as you went your way, you grow kinship.

By asking the Old Ones to remember you now, and to make a place for you among them: That is how grief waters life. That is how grief gets learned. That is how a village is made, by your life being spilled on the groaning board in the banquet hall of life, where all the big stories are told again. That is what human redemption looks like. With all of this, of course there are regrets. Of course. Down along the fence line in the back forty of your life there is a pile of stones—your regrets. If you don’t go down there to visit them often, you’ll end up thinking either that they’re not there at all or that they make a pile a mile high. Here it is: They’re almost always there, and the pile is rarely as high as you think. When the ending of days comes into view, that’s a good time to visit that little altar. Here’s my advice. Don’t add another stone to the pile by the way you are with the ending of days. Just remember. Then, climb that little hill, picking up one stone at a time and putting it back in place, remembering. It’s not all bad. When you get to the top, look around. That’s the great pasture and field of your life, with everything it was now visible. You can only really see it from up there. That’s the big story.

Grief is an ability to know certain things about life well and an ability to proceed in your life as if they are true.

Grief is what you do with what comes to you. Very few people seek it out or want to get good at it, but grief is an ability as vital to our emotional and spiritual and community life as the skill of love.

So it is with love’s older and probably wiser sibling. Grief, the epic humanness of being willing to know life well, you learn first by being fretted over and missed and mourned over by others, by being on the receiving end. It grows in you the same kind of worthiness. Maybe you are moving away from a job or a community of people that grew to know you and count on you, and in their melancholy farewells in the office hallway or over the back fence you recognize something of how on your better days you tried to live. The feel of people longing after you and missing you begins your ability to grieve.

To feel the consequence of your absence is what awakens in you the ability to feel absence.

Loving and grieving are joined at the hip, for all the beauty, soul, and travail that brings. Grief is a way of loving what has slipped from view. Love is a way...

Grief is a way of loving, love is a way of grieving. They need each other in ...

This is the great act of faith our time requires of us, that we live as if we have been entrusted with something precious and mandatory, as people needed by an imperiled time. That is what farmers, those of us left, have become now: We preserve heritage seeds mostly by planting them.

You and I will die. This is a given, entirely proper. It is a whorl in the thumbprint of the Maker of Life. But the manner of our dying is not a given. That, with deep labor, is up to us. This is one of the life gifts entrusted to us at birth, dazzling as the night sky and burdensome as any vision is of how it all could be.