This past Sunday I was joined by activist, farmer, author and founder of The Orphan Wisdom School, Stephen Jenkinson, for a public conversation entitled: “Death Phobia and Grief Illiteracy: How They Distance Us From One Another, Our Planet, and Our World Crisis.”
It was a rich conversation, animated by Stephen’s wry humor and unflinching contact with death and fear. We went deep with our inquiry of how it is possible to “die wise” in a culture that has institutionalized the practice of bypassing dying altogether.
Stephen worked for many years in what he calls the “death trade,” as a former program director in a major Canadian hospital, consulting to palliative care and hospice organizations, and working extensively with dying people and their families. Having seen vividly how what he calls our cultural “death phobia” prevents us from supporting people in making healthy embodied choices about the end of life, he has dedicated himself to revolutionizing grief and dying in North America. He focuses on the care of the soul, and it is there that he is an uncommon diagnostician.
I asked Stephen to frame our conversation by sharing what he means by “death phobia.” He attributes it to our inability to deal with endings and a misguided, heroic attempt at bypassing the process and experience of dying, in essence to die physically but not spiritually or existentially. This, he says, is expiring, not dying.
Death phobia is so prevalent in North America because there is less dying in our midst, and our responses to it are mostly technical — pain and symptom management — which avoid the reality of dying. We contact books about dying but rarely actual people who are dying.
I reflected on the deaths of loved ones I’ve experienced in my own life, and wondered if in allowing ourselves to be cut deeply by loss and grief, perhaps we can go beyond the perspective of our personal narrative. I wondered if perhaps as a culture we are being pushed beyond our collective narratives, asked to find different kinds of intelligence. After all, most of us live as if we will never die. The old as well as the young. What then is the alternative opportunity to “dying without dying.” How can we be in honest relationship with the inevitability of our own death now?
Stephen offered an answer that he cautioned was probably not a “gesture of customer satisfaction.” He suggested that the deep ethics of your dying time need you not to ask what dying will do to you, but to inquire what it asks of you.
The next challenge is to resist the cultural influence to establish an elaborate coping strategy where you keep the realities of dying at bay while working out the meaning of life. Living and dying is vast, uncharted territory—a mystery that is relentlessly faithful only to the mystery of itself. Death doesn’t wait for your best day to arrive, or until you’ve achieved wisdom or you feel prepared. Instead, it requires you to understand where in the arc of your days you are now, or else you face it unmoored and ungrounded.
Grief is the animating orientation to the parts of life that you wish were otherwise—and legitimately so. Stephen did not pretend he is free of fear of death, or discomfort with it. He was emphatic in admitting that he has no wish to die soon. He admitted that the idea that the world will go on without him is a sorrow-soaked proposition for him. Some part of him wishes it were not so, and yet some part of him is enormously willing for it to be so. It was tender to be with him as he admitted how both of those things are alive within him.
I was especially interested to hear Stephen’s insights on the human relationship to climate change and the paradoxical death phobia that he says underlies most ecological care. He traced this mis-orientation to a phenomenon he observed while engaged in the heart-breaking work of counseling terminal children and their parents.
What parents seemed to grieve most, even more so that the actual loss of the child, was the idea of the “lost potential” and the “unlived life.” Yet when Stephen gently explored this with the children he found they could not even conceive of this idea. To them, their life was ongoing and realized and entirely now.
He says this idea of lost potential is “high on the agenda of climate change activism” and contributes to the tone of misanthropy that dominates most climate change activism, as if the best solution is absenting ourselves from the equation. He quipped “only humans are capable of misanthropy, not trees” and suggested that we are going to have to find some motivation for our coming days that doesn’t include degrading ourselves.
But he also acknowledged that in our time, if we awaken at all, we do so “with a sob,” encountering a landscape so disfigured that it is all too tempting to find ways to anesthetize ourselves.
Grief, not hope is the answer. While hope is “hostile to the present” in a troubled time, we feel obligated to hope, even when we’re dying. When we become grief-literate we cultivate the willingness to spend longer periods of time learning to grieve over the sorrowing and heartbreaking truth of where we are. A deep gratitude can perhaps then become available—for the remarkable, quixotic alchemy of being alive and living long enough to realize that you are alive.
For many bewildered dying people the problem wasn’t that they were dying, but that they didn’t know where they were in the arc of their days. They were lost, and had not a clue as to where they were in the dying process. Do we know where we are in the arc of the days of our current order? The symptoms are at such a great distance. So you have to make up your mind more or less arbitrarily that the time of trouble is upon us now, that there’s nothing to wait for that will be a clearer affirmation than the ones that are available to us at the moment.
A troubled time like ours needs people who are the kin of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Stephen says Beckett’s powerful title, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, is an achievement “beyond belief.” There’s no conjunction between the two statements. It is a grief-informed orientation to a troubled time, because it is austerely candid about both realities. He’s not saying “I don’t think I can go on.” He’s just testifying that there’s such a thing as “I can’t go on” without obliging himself or anyone else to get beyond it. But there’s more, which doesn’t eliminate the first part, “I’ll go on.” The marching orders of today might be something like this — we’re going to have to craft an ability to go on, not being able to. These things occur at the same time.
Our grief endorses and animates our celebration of life in a troubled time. The particular afflictions of our time have not sunk into our bones yet, partly because they don’t register first in North America. They register elsewhere. So we fret over these matters. What do grownups do at a time like this? Part of the job description is to testify so that others can learn where the hell we are in this process that seems to be quickening. We can begin to see where we are in the arc of our days as a species. And thus, Stephen says, “more or less self-appointed, we fan out over the countryside of our sorrows and see whether or not…we can be of some use. It’s not more glorious than that.”
Stephen also says, “my part is to plead for the learning of the thing that sorrows us.”
I invite you to access the recording here.
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Thanks for the interview Terry and Steve! I sent it out to a bunch of my friends and thought deeply about it. You both are doing great and necessary work! I do, however, have a different understanding and relationship to grief, endings and death it seems, from what I heard from Steve.
I cite some differences. For some context, I should state that I am a wholehearted fiend at everything I do, grief included. I am nearly seventy now, I’ve been at this study of the self and life thing for a long time, and this is my understanding. Steve stated that grief is not a process with a beginning, middle, and end. That is not my experience. I am emphatically not in the grief stricken state that resulted from the loss of my first wife in my twenties, various other love relationships, my parents, and so on. Deeply experiencing these losses that cut through to core of my sense of self at the time, each, as the process was felt and integrated, opened my heart to new depths of capacity for joy, intimacy, and love, and yes, further capacity for grief when it visits. They deepened my sense being a full on lover of life, and to my many creative and emotional dimensions. They were essential in sensitizing my being to all of life’s stuff. They each added up to my loving more moment to moment, as I learned that all of the focuses of my love are preciously fragile and time bound just like me. Being more alive to their mortality and other forms of endings makes each instant all the more impassioned. Many of these engagements with the grief process also opened to a cosmic grief toward all of humans and the ecosphere. Glimpses of universal compassion. But, alas, paradox looms! On the other hand, I have spent most of my life in many many positive experiences that were not an avoidance of grief, but the grief free enjoyment of my unique forms of expression, service, and deep fun. I have had to experience fully something to lose! It’s healthy to be fully in grief when it is there and not to avoid its visits, but also to utterly forget about death, the reality of total loss of all we are and whom we cherish and just be in life for its own sake. It’s a great koan to “always be aware of our own and every one we set our eyes on’s impending death AND to utterly forget that and just enjoy life! Which brings me to Peace, yes peace. I have another perspective than the analogy Steve shared that peace is like the meaninglessness of having a good green lawn in a drought. Instead, I would say true vibrant peace is an oasis in a drought. And peace isn’t something separate from any and all states that I identify with and therefore something to hide in. No, it is a kind spaciousness that permeates all of my experience, even when I am weeping and raging at the tragic aspects of life. It is being whole, being of one piece. Ever developing and sharing our wholeness and our fullest possible presence is the greatest gift we can give to life. The more inwardly peaceful we are, the more we have access to the multiplicity of our human and “spiritual” qualities like patience, joy, laughter, compassion, the capacity to selflessly serve, express appropriate anger and so on to bring to bear exactly what each moment requires. This realm is our core, not grief (one collage of states), nor even paradox. The full and intimate experience of the grief process, and the contemplative holding of the polarities of life’s paradoxes are necessary to open to the fullness of being. However, they are not our core of cores. They are essential paths for sure, but we are way more than that. I did not hear this perspective at all in the interview. Steve is a great awakener to a hugely common denial and I applaud that! But, again the interview didn’t convey the most balanced map of our souls. Maybe that wasn’t its intention, to share a balanced map, but instead to provoke thought. And you both succeeded! I, however, seek balance and these are my thoughts I’m compelled to share and lose a bit of sleep over articulating! So again, I thank you both for inspiring me and everyone else as well!! Keep up the terrific work!! Richard Grimaldi
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I appreciate the inclusiveness and expansion that your comments bring to the conversation. I have been reading Stephen’s Die Wise, and find much wisdom in his writing…and much wisdom in holding the polarities you reference. Thank you.
I wish Stephen or Terry could read RIchard’s comment and respond. Are we to simmer in heartbreak to cultivate the necessary skill of broken heartedness and/or is the outcome of that the place Richard speaks of? So those of us just setting out on the great unraveling of denied grief and death have a lighthouse in the waves?
“spaciousness that permeates all of my experience, even when I am weeping and raging at the tragic aspects of life. It is being whole, being of one piece. Ever developing and sharing our wholeness and our fullest possible presence is the greatest gift we can give to life. The more inwardly peaceful we are, the more we have access to the multiplicity of our human and “spiritual” qualities like patience, joy, laughter, compassion, the capacity to selflessly serve, express appropriate anger and so on to bring to bear exactly what each moment requires. This realm is our core, not grief (one collage of states), nor even paradox. The full and intimate experience of the grief process, and the contemplative holding of the polarities of life’s paradoxes are necessary to open to the fullness of being. However, they are not our core of cores. They are essential paths for sure, but we are way more than that. “
Dear Soul Here, Richard’s comments are indeed extremely rich and compelling. It’s not easy to meet the depth and power of Stephen’s message, and take things further, and I think Richard does. He also posted them to Beyond Awakening’s facebook page. I thanked him there for helping to “balance out the map.” https://www.facebook.com/beyondawakening/?ref=hl I resonate with your observations too, and the feeling depth, and pain that undergirds the voice that asks this poignant question. I don’t pretend to have answers. But I do live with faith. I learn, again and again, to trust the process of my life, especially when it seems most awkward messy and imperfect. It is a profound spiritual task to glimpse and stay faithful to the invisible light when you’re seemingly drowning in the waves of grief. Sometimes it seems like it takes all our strength. But I try. And I encourage you to let go and trust, and in that way try also. Wishing you all good things, Terry
I find this so eloquent and so perfectly true. Thank you for sharing your insight so beautifully. If I could have said it so well I would have said exactly what you are saying. Makes me think we are not separate and there is One Mind!!!!!!!
I too am grateful you invited Stephen to speak. He’s spoken more than any other to my depths for the past five years.
Partly I like his plain speaking, his story telling, his humour, and clarity about what he has learned.
Thanks
Thank you, so much for having Stephen on Beyond Awakening. For me, hearing him is like water in a blistering desert. Especially now while my human mother is dying…while our culture is impoverished and dangerous, while our mother earth is, as Stephen says, so terribly disfigured, just about everywhere.
PLEASE do have this man on again. Soon. His way of seeing and speaking truth around death/grief, and therefore, life/Life, is electrifying, revolutionizing.
Maia, I’m glad you found the broadcast so compelling. We do hope invite Stephen back at some point. Blessings to both you and to your mother at this poignant time of passage. Warmly, Terry