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Die Wise

A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

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About this listen

 Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the page and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well. Die Wise is for those who will fail to live forever.

Dying well, Jenkinson writes, is a right and responsibility of everyone. It is not a lifestyle option. It is a moral, political, and spiritual obligation each person owes their ancestors and their heirs. Die Wise dreams such a dream, and plots such an uprising. How we die, how we care for dying people, and how we carry our dead: this work makes our capacity for a village-mindedness, or breaks it.

Table of Contents
The Ordeal of a Managed Death
Stealing Meaning from Dying
The Tyrant Hope
The Quality of Life
Yes, But Not Like This
The Work
So Who Are the Dying to You?
Dying Facing Home
What Dying Asks of Us All
Kids
Ah, My Friend the Enemy Death & Dying Grief & Loss Personal Development Relationships Social Sciences Sociology Dream Medicine

Critic reviews

“Stephen Jenkinson’s elegant and sorrow-freighted book brings prophetic insight rather than pastoral affirmations. A true story-man, Jenkinson paints image after image on the cave wall of his parchment. Die Wise is a formidable body of work, road-tested in ways most of us hope never to know about. Stay with it, hold the sorrow as the gift it is, savor in small, immense chunks. Every word is an invitation to trade fantasy for imagination. There isn’t a book like it.”
—Dr. Martin Shaw, author of Snowy Tower: Parzival and the Wet, Black Branch of Language
All stars
Most relevant
loved it .hit the spot for me.get this awesome book. it's well worth reading ..

amazing. best book of 2017 so far..

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Jenkinson is a master story-teller. Draw close to the hearth and allow his gut-wrenching, heart-breaking wisdom to bring you home to the truth of love, grief, death and living in these times. Don’t wait until a terminal diagnosis arrives to absorb these teachings. I am immeasurably impacted, forever altered, eternally grateful for this gift.

Essential wisdom for being human

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this has guided me and kept me sane as I was with my mother throughout her dying,it is indeed a manifesto for sanity and soul

I'm grateful for this boom

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Beneath the apparent initial grumpiness, the occasional obtuseness, and the poetry, there is a great depth of wisdom and emotional intelligence here. Treasures await, for one willing to dig patiently.

Jenkinson is a superb storyteller, and thus he carried me with him, through the slow or heavy parts, to the parts that shone astonishingly, and moved me to tears - sobs of recognition, exclamations of wonder, and entirely new ways of thinking about death, and living, and loving, and remembering, and grieving...

There is no adequate way to write a short review for this extraordinary book. You can find long reviews that go into detail and do it some justice if you search the Internet a little.

I have filled my copy with bookmarks and notes, have revisited the best bits often, and will listen again many times in the years to come. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Subtle and superb

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I am very grateful to Sara, who recommended this book to me. I had heard the author on a podcast about two years ago, and I wasn’t interested. I have now listened to two of his books, this being one, and I think his words have had a big impact on me; so many things I take for granted, many fresh takes on things I had not considered. Thank you Stephen and Sara.

A journey

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