Tomorrow, Stephen Jenkinson will be speaking with two colleagues to discuss the lasting impact of Die Wise on grief counselling, death doulas, and the way these ideas continue to shape our world, Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín, a neuroscientist studying human consciousness and on Sunday with Dr. Manfred Becker, filmmaker exploring the afterlife. Those two 90 min. talks will be live, as a way of marking the 10 year anniversary of Die Wise, A Manifesto for Sanity & Soul.
You’ll get to experience the depth of Stephen’s work in a pretty unique way: through 4 recorded grief counsel sessions with dying people, hearing Stephen practice, in 2025, the kind of work described in Die Wise ten years ago.
Stephen’s time in the death trade charged him with the duty to find a language for death, a place for death to appear. For more than two decades Stephen has been signalling, and calling for our attention to articulate our troubles. In these conversations, we hear him at work.
“heart tenderizing conversation.” D.C
“I have heard Stephen talk about grief a lot, but this exchange really touched me in deeper way.” E.D
“The depths and breadth of this gift ~ Sanity & Soul ~ is beyond what I hadn’t even imagined possible. Thank you.” W.C
“I so deeply appreciate the adherence to the moment and what it is most deeply calling for” A.L
From Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín:
In our death-phobic culture, cramped with hypes & hopes and copes & dopes, Stephen Jenkinson miraculously (but routinely) translates the ineffable and exhorts the impossible in a poetic prose that is not of this earth — you must come and listen to the man speak; if blessed, you shall hear within the silence a heartful ode to broken-heartedness that elevates our souls while grounding our mortality back to the dirt where it belongs. Time to surrender and subvert in order to break the spell of the un-real.
From Dr. Manfred Becker:
I met Stephen 15 years ago, helping a dear friend, Tim Wilson, on his documentary on Stephen, ‘Griefwalker’. Years later, Stephen sat down in my kitchen for a follow up interview. I now consider him a mentor. Mentors offer guidance to unanswered – and at times, unanswerable – questions about life, and death.
On Sunday, I will have the opportunity to ask him some of mine:
- in these times of decolonializing our minds, do we integrate wisdom and knowledge about death and dying from ‘the other,’ outside the echo chamber of our Anglo northern hemisphere?
- with the Earth being under threat more than ever, do we need to transfer the urgency to ‘die consciously,’ from the individual to humanity itself?
- and how to be in this world after you – through fate or circumstance – have been given your life back?
I am very much looking forward to the 90 minutes with Stephen on Sunday.
