Sanity and Soul: Die Wise, Ten Years On
High Stepping
In the place I was born to, habit drove the engine of almost everything. The metronomic plodding of the inevitable calendar-driven days: that was the cadence. Working for the weekend. High-fiving the ghosts. Making do in the suburbs. Getting used to everything was more valued than getting good at anything.
None of which helps when your number gets called, and the jig is up.
There’s shock instead, and a Lord-have-mercy divination of things never done, things poorly understood, lousily loved. Life set aside.
And then, crawling from the dust and rubble, blessed and caved in, there’s youand there’s now.
And there’s some choosing to be done.
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I think I loved the death trade well enough. I knew the privilege of it, the madness, the banquet of sorrows and love that made up the work. I think that shows in Die Wise.
On St. Patrick’s day coming, Die Wise will be a decade in the world, and a going concern for all of that time. Lo, the book and its audience found each other.
Which I would never have seen coming.
All of this decade’s heavy weather – its carnage, its desert sojourn, that decent run of good fortune, and now the maker’s mark of frailty upon me – stirs me to strike up the string band of my unsteady ligaments and high step it a bit.
I’ve mobilized the Orphan Wisdom ensemble to grind out the details, I’ve prevailed upon a few willing dying people to join us. I’ve invited a couple of luminary allies to join me on-camera.
And now I’m inviting you to join me in bearing witness to Sanity & Soul: Die Wise, Ten Years On, a livestream encounter with a life’s work. I’m meaning to celebrate.
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Here’s what you get:
1. I’ve just finished conversations with several dying people, God bless them. It is much as it was in the old death-trade days when Die Wise was firming up in me. We’ll edit these recordings a bit to retain anonymity. Those talks will be available for you to ponder as soon as you register for the event. This will be me in the old saddle.
2. In mid-March, on the tenth year anniversary of Die Wise being published, I’ll be interviewed by two esteemed death scholars and noble friends of Orphan Wisdom.
They will be asking me about what ten years has done to my convictions about dying, and what receiving a neurodegenerative diagnosis is doing to my understandings of life now, other worthy things. This will be a kind of meditation, you could say, on oracular degeneration. We’ll take a good long look at what I’ve been entrusted with, and what it might stand for now.
On Saturday 15 March I’ll have ninety minutes live with Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín, professor of neuroscience at Instituto de Neurociencias (CSIC-UMH) in Alicante, Spain. He is a good friend who brought me to the Pari Centre in Italy in 2023. Together we are preparing a book, a kind of thinking man’s manual of neurodegeneration.
On Sunday 16 March I’ll sit for ninety minutes live with Dr. Manfred Becker, professor of cinema and culture at Toronto’s York University and decades-long documentarian, who’s making a major film on AI and the possibilities for immortality, which he interviewed me for. Dr. Becker, a new friend, was a consultant on Griefwalker, a film about my early work in the death trade.
So, if you have mortality on your horizon, if you think dying just has to be better, saner, more soulful than we’ve made it out to be, if you love being alive, with all the mystery and grief that brings, if you count yourself among the walking wounded, or if your heart is due some spirited attention, then this weekend is for you.
Stephen Jenkinson
Sanity and Soul: Die Wise, Ten Years On
A Livestream Encounter
March 15 & 16
When last fall, Stephen mentioned he wanted to mark the ten year anniversary of Die Wise, we began crafting this five session event.
There are three conversations of Stephen speaking with people who are dying. We will hear him weave the death literacy that he has spoken so much about. We are particularly blessed by the willingness of these people to participate in this event.
And there will then be the two livestream sessions with learned companions. He’ll be speaking with Dr. Gómez-Marín in Spain by zoom and Dr. Becker will be sitting with Stephen in San Diego.
Attendance:
$400 USD early bird, $500 USD regular rate
Purchase Book (audio/ paperback)
