Stephen Jenkinson. 2015. North Atlantic Books. 416p.
Jenkinson’s mystical, dense and poetic text draws on his long experience as a self-labelled ‘death angel’ who discussed dying and death with tens of thousands of people when he worked in palliative care.
It is deeply critical of mainstream approaches which promote ‘More Time’ and ‘Quality of Life’ following the creed ‘If you can, you should’, but which end up doing those involved and society few favours. With no allusions that death is easy, he suggests we need to shift our perspective away from ‘battling’ to ‘wrestling’ with it, using humility and wonder.
The book is a radical tour de force that reflects broadly on many issues, including suggesting the typical Western fear and denial of mortality originates from “relentless and unreflective absolutism” of monotheistic religion that perpetuates an ancestral trauma of flight and homelessness.
