Jenkinson worked as a chaplain in hospice and palliative care for many years in Canada. This book is a brilliant and scathing critique of how reform efforts in medical care (and “the death trades”) have ended up replicating the same death-denying, extending life for more dying, etc. I love the way he connects these cultural strains to the entire life cycle and the relationship between humans and land and ancestors. There are many ideas and reflections to love. There are also romantic generalizations about unnamed indigenous cultures and not much about his own history beyond Harvard Divinity School. He is often on tour and has a school in Canada on his farm called “Orphan Wisdom”

Excerpt:

STARS. It’s dark. You are standing in a field, far from the house. This is the midnight sky of your younger, wilder days. It is ablaze, aching with stars. It is the vault of heaven, indigo sea of time pierced by light from the other side. The horizons are gone and the Bridge of Sighs, the one they say the dead walk to leave this world, dazzles you. Dew settles on your shoulders and you’re atremble, no longer full with comprehension and certainties. Every idea you have seems too small for the world. The blessings tumble. You lived long enough to see a night such as this, and you’re stilled by it. There are unlikely companions in the field with you, everyone quiet. Someone looks up into the night sky and says, “You see that star right there? Could be it isn’t there anymore.” All conviction is sent reeling. Nothing is truer than this. The mysteries roll…

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 everyday, unwinding, above your busyness, or because you thought you knew them already. The wonder takes a willingness to be uncertain, to be thrown. …

[S}tarlight traveling a bewildering distance for so long that there is every chance that it doesn’t even exist anymore, and all of that having already happened, and you standing there, your face blazed in the dark by a starlight gone. Seeing it all, what is and what isn’t there enthroned by your witness: That is a marvel, and surely that is how awe is born in us. With somebody alongside you in the dark you can think unauthorized thoughts, you can see what’s gone, or whether it’s gone, or both.

…So I am counting on this possibility: That out of the encounter with confounding starlight could come marvel and gratitude for being here, alive, for now…(And) The times of dying, of real and proper sorrow, could be woven by a gratitude… for being overwhelmed by something that happens every day, by ordinary awe. And each of us could be gathered in by that raveling covenant of sorrow and thanksgiving…Drink enough of the sweet, strong mead of grief and love for being alive and it isn’t long before you’re sending a trembling, life-soaked greeting out to everything that came before you and to everything that will follow…