culture
cultural traditions around death exist to inform a population on how to deal with life’s ultimate ending. Death practices are deeply ingrained in cultures, often being a final reflection on their most important beliefs and values. This section takes a look at death traditions around the world, and compares and contrasts them to what's happening in North America.
Die Wise
Insights from the Griefwalker
contributer MIA VAMOS-YUHASZ
Below is our first interview, an intese and reflective conversation with a man who has made talking about dying his business.
Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW, Founder of The Orphan Wisdom School | Photo by Mark Tucker
As with anything of immense consequence, you need to get the sequence right. Death and dying, no matter how alliterate it sounds, just isn’t the way things go.
“It’s dying first, and death second,” says Stephen Jenkinson, and if anyone should know, it’s him.
Jenkinson has born witness to well over 1,000 deaths in his lifetime, particularly when he worked as the director of a palliative care team at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Ont.
Jenkinson’s credentials are extensive. He has a master’s degree in theology from Harvard University, as well as a master’s degree in social work from the University of Toronto. He’s even been an apprentice to a master storyteller, which is evident in the poetic and rather mesmerizing manner in which he speaks.
Jenkinson was also the subject of a documentary called Griefwalker, which was filmed over the course of 12 years and showcases his often life-changing work with dying people.
Jenkinson is still a highly sought-after consultant to palliative care and hospice organizations, but his professional title has extended well past that of an end of life care expert. Now, he is an author, speaker–he spends several months every year touring the world speaking and hosting workshops–spiritual activist, teacher, traditional canoe builder, ceremonialist, and farmer– he currently lives on a handmade, off the grid farm in the Ottawa Valley with his wife, Nathalie.
It’s on this farm that Jenkinson has been able to bring a lifetime of distinctive skills and knowledge together to create something uniquely his own: the Orphan Wisdom School. The school incorporates teachings on history, ancestry, spirituality, and culture, ultimately to teach people how to live deeply, and die wise.
That’s a fundamental part of Jenkinson’s mission: to teach people how to Die Wise– which is a very specific word choice, and also the title of his newest book.
“The truth is, that virtually every dying person that I attended, their dying resembled their living,” says Jenkinson.
The best time to start thinking about dying is now. A person’s ability to die well, or die wise, is something that has to be crafted over a lifetime.
“There’s nothing to wait for, because it won’t get realer the older you get,” says Jenkinson.
He uses the example of growing a tree. “The best time to plant a tree is 25 years ago. If you want a tree now, you should have planted it then.”
Unfortunately, North Americans on the whole are not very good at planting.
“The North American orientation of dying is that the best dying is actually the least dying, the one that happens the quickest. And how do you get a quick death? If you don’t know that you’re dying. Most of us believe it’s the knowing that you’re dying that causes the real suffering,” says Jenkinson.
Jenkinson sees the overwhelming death-phobia in North America as a product of a very particular set of historical processes and events tied to immigration.
“When people involuntarily started abandoning their homeland to come to America, there’s a few things that they abandoned that nobody seems to address, and one of them is their ancestral dead and by extension their ancestral inheritance, their ancestral identity. They become hyphenated people,” says Jenkinson.
“The consequence of this is that you’re capacity to be a people is entirely up for grabs, no shared understanding of so many things, really not even a shared language,” he continues.
And so we get a disconnected society, and a society that’s driven by a deep, underlying fear, instead of an ancestral understanding of life and death. We also get a society wrought with cultural appropriation.
“The only people who insist that everything in the world is for them are the people that come from nowhere. And North Americans are at the front of the line in claiming that everything is here for us,” says Jenkinson.
He sees people appropriating cultural knowledge without having any real connection to those ideas. Jenkinson thinks that when something belongs to a culture–an idea, or any kind of object–not only does it belong to them, but they to it. This important mutuality is missing when people “drift from one cultural appropriation event to the next,” he says.
“These things are just a kind of sequence of poverties that are masquerading as people trying to figure it out."
A death phobic culture
Consequences
The “retched cultural poverty” that North Americans live in has profound implications for how they live, and how they die.
Many people wander through life, calling it freedom. They have no connection to any place that they owe deep respect to, and no understanding of the people that came before them.
A question that many people have when it’s their turn to die is, “To whom shall I die?” says Jenkinson.
Ancestral knowledge, it turns out, not only gives people a framework for where they might be going when they die, but also carries with it the promise that they won’t be forgotten–that their identity won’t die with them. Without that, death carries with it a real wretched fear.
“What we do around people who are dying is so meagre, so generic, so uninformed by a deep cultural understanding of anything, that people are dying in the presence of the real possibility that they will, in every way that this can be meant, cease to exist,” says Jenkinson.
Jenkinson encourages everyone to learn about their ancestry. Learn the names of your people, and walk the same streets they walked down. Learn the language that they spoke. Find your answer for “To whom shall I die?”
Another solution to death-phobia is to use language wisely, and to pick words that do “justice to the reality of dying.”
“Language is either spell casting or spell breaking, ongoingly, and I’m in the business of breaking spells by trying to make them appear, by changing my way of speaking,” says Jenkinson.
He is adamant about the fact that “death” and “loss” should never be used interchangeably.
“When you make them a synonym, what you’re saying is that existentially and spiritually these two things happen as a sequence and they’re more or less inevitably joined. When someone dies, you lose them, and there’s no option about that,” he says.
“Many cultures historically and contemporarily have ritual and ceremonial sequences that are designed to see to it that the dead are not lost. There’s nothing inevitable to them about it, but to us they’re synonyms,” says Jenkinson.
Below, we'll take a look at some death cultures around the wold to see how they incorporate their dead into the land of the living, to honour and remember them, and create a space for death in life.
Solutions
Death Education
contributer MIA VAMOS-YUHASZ
A few days after speaking to Stephen Jenkinson, I had a short Skype conversation with Christopher Ross, associate professor in Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University. Despite the brevity of our conversation, professor Ross left me with some important and resounding insights, which have remained evident throughtout this entire investigative project.
We start our conversation talking about the importance of death education in universities. That’s not to mean mortuary school, but the actual study of how death affects our society and us as individuals. Professor Ross teaches a course called Grief, Death and Dying at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo.
“These course are hugely popular and they’re at most universities. I think it’s filling a need,” says professor Ross.
That’s the need to deal with death.
“The majority of people in my class may have had a grandparent or great grandparent that has died in their life, but if it was as recently as two generations ago, before the Second World War, half the people in my class would have had one parent die already. We’re just not exposed to death in the same way that we used to be, so we need to educate ourselves about it.”
This idea is absolutely spot on to everything else I’ve learned during this project. Our exposure to death in North America is so minimal, so meager, that people generally never think about it, until it’s too late. It’s always the thing that people will think about one day, and when that day comes they’re cripplingly unprepared.
“Our relationship to our own death is absolutely essential to dealing with our own problems,” says professor Ross.
These sentiments are sounding familiar to those of Stephen Jenkinson. I ask professor Ross is he knows of him. The name doesn’t ring a bell, but when I mention Griefwalker a light bulb goes off.
On an interesting side note, I actually found out about Griefwalker because it was listed on the Grief, Death and Dying syllabus of professor Ann Baranowski, one of professor Ross’s colleagues at the university.
“I think he’s really onto something, and it’s something really important,” says professor Ross of Jenkinson.
He is in broad agreement with Jenkinson’s idea of the tragedy of not being connected to your ancestry, and uses an anecdote to elaborate.
“I actually have a related thesis, it’s nothing I’ve done research on but it’s part of my party talk. So, why do you think the tango comes from Argentina, and the sense of the tragic? It’s because out of all the countries in South America that has lost most contact with its first nations, it’s Argentina.
“There’s a sense of loss. You’re just this disconnected European civilization plonked in the Southern Hemisphere, and you’re going to dance the tango with a sense of the tragic because you’re not connected to your roots.”
We then move into a conversation about diversity within funerals. The career of being a funeral director is changing, he says, as they’re being confronted with more diversity.
“Part of the post-modern sensitivity is awareness of diversity, and people developing things themselves, integrating from a variety of sources, and it certainly overlaps with our ethic in Canada. Part of our identity is that we’re multicultural. So I think that there’s a real openness now,” he says.
These are sentiments that will be echoed in our interview with a young funeral director from Brantford, Ont, found in the You’re Dead section of the website.
We finish our interview with a conversation about religion.
“You won’t hear me very often quoting Billy Graham, the evangelical preacher that was a part of my childhood, but one thing he talked about was there’s a god-shape blank in our life, and I think there is kind of a blank. I think people have a need to wrestle with the big questions,” he says.
“Perhaps conventional religion is not attractive to a lot of people, but there’s a need to deal with death.”
This is, in part, why so many young people are turning to his class.
Below, professor Ross speaks to Steve Paikin on The Agenda about death in religion, and talks about his own beliefs as a Buddhist.