Whether or not we like it, we’re all going to die, we just don’t know how or when.
This is a concept that scares the hell out of many North Americans, says counsellor Stephen Jenkinson, a culture that, as much as possible tries to avoid sadness by adopting the message of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy.”
But this attitude neither prepares us to die nor to cope with the death of a loved one.
This is something Jenkinson will discuss in his return engagement to Salmon Arm, at the invitation of the Shuswap Hospice Society on Sunday and Monday, Oct. 21 and 22.
Jenkinson maintains that living with dying, be it your own or someone else’s, and loving life in the process, is a skill that has to be learned.
In the North American culture, grief is seen as an affliction, “a misery that intrudes into the life we deserve, a rupture of the natural order of things, a trauma” that requires management and a process to follow in order to recover.
Add to that well-intended cheerleaders, who when they think enough time has elapsed, urge those who are grieving to get over it or get on with it, and get past the grieving.
People who are grieving have to create a whole new life for themselves and the popular notion of striving to be OK is actually crippling.
“This being OK, we’re not supposed to be OK. Here’s the revolution: What if grief is a skill, something that must be learned and cultivated and taught? What if grief is the natural order of things, a way of loving life anyway?” he asks on his website at www.orphanwisdom.com.
Described as a teacher, author and spiritual activist, Jenkinson says he was pulled into grief counselling in a large Toronto hospital in the early 1990s by medical and counselling staff who were concerned about two groups of men who had loved ones who were either dying or had already died.
One group was belligerent and hostile and the other group would not talk at all.
“Eventually, we pulled a group together and there I learned very quickly something I didn’t know previously,” he said.
“People knew how to be angry, but they didn’t know how to be sad.”
Within two years, Jenkinson was the head of a psycho-social team at the hospital, in charge of the non-medical side of palliative care.
Initially scheduled to continue for six weeks, the group extended to 18 months, overlapping other groups.
“Talking was not hard to do; talking about what is the issue,” he says. “What I realized was there is no language that does justice to what dying asks of you and two, how brutally difficult it is to die well in this culture.”
For example, Jenkinson points to his work with children who were dying.
Even at a very young age, children realize when they may or may not express their true feelings.
“They learned the code already; when their family was around they had to be OK,” he says. “They knew they couldn’t express sadness around their parents.”
On the other hand, he says, a dying parent is often in the position of safeguarding the sanity of the people who aren’t dying, thereby shutting down their own feelings of sadness.
“We’re not helping,” he says of the North American approach to death, dying and sadness. “Everyone’s read the book and drank the same Kool Aid in this matter.”
Jenkinson says anyone who attends his workshop with a willingness to be utterly open about their own lives and with a willingness not to know everything, will begin to learn that grief is one of the mandatory arts of being a human being.
“I’ve been teaching this for 25 years and I’m still at the introductory level,” he says. “The idea that we’re not good at this strikes people as nonsensical, but there’s lots to learn and the question is whether people are willing to do that.”
Grief Walking, the workshop on the soul of a well-lived life, how we care for the dying people in our midst and how to die when it’s our turn, runs Monday, Oct. 22 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Prestige Harbourfront Resort.
The workshop costs $115. Lunch is included.
To register, visit www.shuswaphospice.ca or call Judy at 250-832-7099.
A screening of Griefwalker, a portrait of Jenkinson’s life, followed by a talk, will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Salmar Classic Theatre. Admission is by donation to the Shuswap Hospice Society.