Pierz Newton-John on Stephen Jenkinson

[Laughs].

“And your dying will have the same gorgeous particulars attending to it!” What was the first line in Anna Karenina? Do you know it?

Yeah, “All happy families look alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.”

Okay. All of the managed deaths look alike, and I just described them to you. And all the unmanaged deaths were remarkably non-compliant with this norm I’ve just articulated. Not intentionally non-compliant. Some minority of people simply had found, or stumbled across, or backed into, a willingness to engage their death as a god. Not that anybody ever said it that way. And the god of death is a god, as is the god of grain, and the god of the ocean, and so on. And all it means is for you to craft some understanding of and become a bit of a practitioner of the etiquette that approaching a god asks of us.

That’s what it is. It’s not subservience. It’s etiquette, but of a deep and radical kind. And if you understand your death to be a deity, not an executioner, then what repertoire do you draw upon? Not endurance, not coping, not acceptance. What? Something closer to devotion. Something closer to learning. The very undoing of trauma. Why didn’t I see legions of this other kind? You can bust me on what I’m about to say. But they didn’t need me, you see? There was no reason for me to be at the good ones.

By definition, what’s my job? To become obsolete in people’s lives. I know people in this business who think it’s their responsibility to be at people’s doorstep every other day when the dying becomes active. To become part of the family? My take on it is if I’m worth anything to these people at all, I’m gone by dying time. Right? Otherwise I’m a bit of a ghoul frankly. Where I’ve worked out an arrangement where they can have continued recourse to me: what does that sound like? Sounds like job security. Right? And a lot of people trafficked in job security. Pretending that the people needed them. But you crafted that neediness. So more malpractice, you see? Surely your responsibility is to work yourself out of a job.

So in coming in and attempting to help people see their death as an angel rather than an executioner, some of them might have taken that as you coming in to break all the furniture and trash the place?

Yeah. Well here’s the thing. Let us not trade inadvertently on the idea that people with a terminal diagnosis get it and people without a terminal diagnosis don’t. And that when you’re dying you become a spiritual genius mysteriously. Or when you’re not dying you’re a lunkhead like the rest of us.

Yeah!

There is nothing conferred upon you by way of understanding or intuition or anything that comes with a terminal diagnosis, frankly. It is a life-altering event within very specific limits. And this is the grotesquery of it all, that I didn’t see a terminal diagnosis change everything. Did a terminal diagnosis change a dying person’s understanding of what it means to love and be loved? I almost never saw that. What they did instead was they re-entrenched their pre-morbid understanding of love. They built it higher and stronger. Love is not giving up. And love is staying with it, trying another round of chemo. Honest to Christ, I’m telling you this is what I saw. How has their understanding of what it means to love somebody been changed by the fact that they’re dying? In other words, who’s the god here?

Everything that resists dying is the deity in a culture that doesn’t believe in endings. And everything that is willing to end is demonic in a culture that doesn’t believe in endings.

See? That’s what I was contending with. Does anybody articulate it this way? Of course not. They just lived it. The white light of death phobia is invisible. Okay? So I had to find a prism to refract it, so I could begin to see its constituents. And that’s what I was able to do. And if I have any nominal use to anybody else, I think that’s probably what my usefulness might be. It’s to have found a language that articulates the constituent parts of this death phobia so that it becomes legible and we become, in some fashion, lucid in this regard.