Die Wise, Tell True: Where the Stories We Carry Shape Our Endings
“Why not talk about it when we’re in the flower of health? Life is finite, isn’t it? So, because it’s finite it would seem that each day is more precious than ever.”
Studs Terkel, Will the Circle Be Unbroken
I read many types of books. But probably, like you, not many about the process of dying, or how to deal with the finite, the kind Studs Terkel was speaking about in his series of interviews on dying. He himself was 90 when it was published in 2001, and had just lost his wife of some 60 years, so he was deep in quite the real negotiation with the reaper.
My preference was always Terry Pratchett’s take (see Mort, or Reaper Man or Hogfather), his DEATH was always a somewhat bewildered observer of humanity, who reminds us of the boundary, but with a sympathetic concern. Not surprising to learn Terry was a proponent of choice in end of life issues. (Terry’s talk on assisted dying)
Back when I was a theater dude in San Francisco in the mid-to-late eighties, the AIDS crisis had many of us pondering death. I remember reading Stephen Levine, who there in San Francisco, along with Ram Dass were inviting us to treat dying as an apprenticeship in tenderness. In clinic rooms and small church basements, they were showing us how attention, breath, and unvarnished presence could make room for love even as bodies failed. (Ram Dass)
A few years earlier, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had already cracked the door, insisting that death belonged in the daylight of our ordinary talk. Her “stages” weren’t railroad tracks so much as a rough map of human weather—tools, not commandments—and they helped many of us name what kept catching in the throat. (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation)
As part of my Elderware project, my friend Lynn here at the Commons, a hospice physician in fact, gave me Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise. It took me a while to pick it up and read it. So I made it my project this Thanksgiving weekend.
Die Wise comes from this lineage of “woke” dying I experienced back in the late eighties and early nineties. He writes like a blunt poet with dirt under his nails, arguing that dying well is a civic duty and a skill we should consider and practice long before hospice—part of the work of becoming actual wise elders instead of just older consumers of new technologies that squeeze life, but not living, out of our final days. He puts death at the center of this discussion of aging well, so we might learn how to live with consequence, not just duration.
The Argument
Jenkinson’s core claim is both simple and scandalous. He suggests our fear of death has metastasized into a civilizational project. We outsource endings, euphemize them, and then wonder why our lives feel thin. What if we carry the knowledge of your finitude on purpose? If we let it contour our love, our labor, our belonging.
Stephenson is a good writer. An excellent storyteller as well(and connected to two of my favorite master storytellers, Martin Shaw who writes the forward, and Brother Blue, to whom he devotes part of his next to last chapter). Underneath his poetic ponderings over 400 pages is a direct and effective argument about how western modernity stole our ability to wisely die. "If it can be done, then do it," is a mantra for all our consumption in life, but also for the ways people in the death business: physicians, psychologists, helping professionals of all kinds, sell us an empty sort of hope instead of a ritual awareness. He raids folklore and scripture, hospice hallways and farm chores, to make his points grittily visceral.
Where Kübler-Ross gave some of us the right to speak openly, and Levine gave us practices of presence during the processes of endings, Jenkinson gives us obligations. He asks not only that we make peace with dying, but that we make kin with it—be accountable to our endings in the same way we are accountable to our beginnings. He’s wary of turning “acceptance” into a spiritual talent show. Instead, he asks for a civic virtue: live so your dying can teach.
No review of this type of book does it justice. I'll simply say it got under my skin. I know I have feared my shuffling off the mortal coil less than I fear saying goodbye to those I love... and for whom I feel responsibility. I don’t want to leave folks hanging, so how I face death and make those plans: advance directives, wills, power of attorney, etc; needs to be a clear-headed process. Why not now. Of course.
Perhaps that’s the task of late life: to metabolize loss into guidance – deciding, again and again, that impermanence isn’t an insult, but the grammar of belonging.
In our practice as story workers, what does Die Wise suggest as practice? Here's some suggestions:
- Have folks practice writing, saying, speaking, the words. “Dying.” “Death.” “Dead.” Retire the euphemisms that isolate.
- Choose witnesses. Make a story circle about how you are approaching death, share you plans, your fears, your stories—and make it reciprocal.
- Build rites. Meals, songs, readings, hand-holding protocols—tiny liturgies that make fidelity possible when speech gets hard.
- Teach by example. Let your aging be legible—your loves, regrets, reconciliations—so someone else can find the path.
If we can befriend change as the native language of life, of story, then dying becomes less a failure and more a final, ferocious lesson in belonging—to our people, our places, our time.
Like Stephenson, I would hope to help others tell the story of dying wise, perhaps one part field note, one part love letter, and as Studs Terkel so encouraged, to remain all in on the living.