Die Wise

A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

De: Stephen Jenkinson

Narrado por: Stephen Jenkinson

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

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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

So Needed

Most will never hear of this important book. Of those who do, most won't pick it up. Of those, fewer still will consume it whole. They are the fortunate, and the burdened. May we bear the burden and share the blessing with grace.

Fantastic and soulful

I have enjoyed Stephen's readings of his books. if you're looking for some wisdom from the other end of life, may I highly recommend this.

Most important book I’ve ever read

This should be required reading in all schools. It is beautiful, heart-wrenching, eye-opening… it brings you home. A must read for the living.

taking in the beauty

if you are lucky enough to come across this audiobook, or have had it recommended to you and you are reading the comments to ascertain if you should put the 20h of your life in to listen... here's a neon sign flashing at you to listen. will you be happier, wiser, or more "enlightened" after? not sure... but maybe, you'll be more equipped to partake in the wonder to come, in whatever comes next in your life, after you listen. yes that sounds wooey and cheesy when I say it but it'll sound eloquent and immensely sincere when Stephen Jenkinson says it.

Vital human education

This was the most profound and re-orienting books I’ve ever read. It really changed the way I always viewed life and death.

Well worth reading

Jenkinson takes the reader on a deep dive into the physical, emotional, and spiritual mysteries of dying and death. It’s hard work to consider his words, but profitable. It’s not necessary for the reader to accept all Jenkinson’s assumptions to benefit from the depth of this treatise.

Grateful

The wisdom in this volume is penetrating and true. In an age mostly devoid of proper training for elderhood, Jenkinson provides an exquisite road map for undertaking the labor of genuinely growing up, maturing into a solid understanding and acceptance of our place in the whirl of grace, grief, love, and Life. This book is a good teacher, as is Death itself.

Superb narration by the author himself

We saw the Canadian documentary about the author soon after it came out. Titled "Griefwalker" it paved the way for our willingness to listen patiently, expectantly throughout this long audiobook. The storytelling is Jenkinson at his best -- and one also thereby learns how he became who he is. Only one other book narrated by its author has impressed us so much. Truly, like sitting around a campfire or a fireplace, enjoying the calm, slow, imagistic way of deftly unravelling our ingrained western antipathy toward death and welcoming another view -- one that our ancestors (perhaps long, long ago) would have known as natural as the the passing of the seasons. We loved this book! And we have listened to the last 4 or 5 hours multiple times, especially the last two -- where all the ideas lurking within the previous stories and passages come clear. Bravo!

Wonderful stories honoring the miracle of death.

Ready yourself for a spiraling journey into the unknowable. This book truly honors the place of in between, expanding on it, deepening in, bringing it into our field of awareness. He is a storyteller, a keeper of tales and has a very, deep gratitude for the wholeness of life. This book is a blessed thing. Thank for writing it and for reading it aloud to me.

Night of the soul

This book, read by the author in his beautiful and impactful voice, is a true gift for all living beings. Words feel superfluous and incapable of expressing the power of this book. It is worth every minute and then some.