#diewise

Die Wise, Stephen Jenkinson

The first book for Thedna Reading Room is Die Wise by Stephen Jenkinson. I am on a year-long journey reading this book, and I am about half through. It is meaty, and not a book you can devour very quickly (at least for me) so I am taking it in chunks. A chapter a month. I am reading it along with another death doula and we get together to discuss two chapters every other month. For this post and this book, I am just going to write down a few excerpts that struck me in the first half. And as we get together to discuss, I’ll write more posts.

If you are in the Seattle area, and would like to join our conversation, please do!

Next book club date is Saturday, Dec. 14th.

Makeda & Mingus

10:30AM-12:30PM 

https://www.facebook.com/events/681201252341907/

This book is about the individual process of dying, how we care for our dying as a community, our death phobic culture, and the philosophy of the medical world when it comes to death. Grief, storytelling and our place in the large scale world is also discussed.

Here are a few excerpts I starred or underlined in my reading- things I loved or things I found bristly, from the first half of the book:

“You need witnesses for wonder. Some things in life are too hard to see by yourself because they take up the whole sky, or because they happen every day, unwinding above your busyness, or because you thought you knew them already.” (pg 2)

“Nobody I’ve met yet wants to learn [about suffering]. But the drugs and the treatments and the way you’ve been doing this so far seem just to add to the suffering instead of giving you some way to do it well.” (pg 54)

“There are cultures in the world where stories are heirlooms...” (pg 45)

“The life of the bush doesn’t depend on us showing up and being mauled and turned into food. None of that is required for the life of the bush to continue... especially when we continue to show up feeling alien and unfit...” (pg 94)

“The meaning of our lives isn’t sitting under a rock somewhere waiting for us to find it.” (pg 99)

“For us it seems mainly to be either that we are victimized by our dying or we are in charge of our dying.” (pg 111)

“’Hope’ is not life, and ‘hopeless’ is not death and depression.” (pg 136) 

“No longer is it a matter of what to do to someone who is dying, but increasingly it is a matter of what not to do to them, and even more acutely, of what to stop doing to them.” (pg 163)