The Forgotten Skills of Dying and Grieving Well: How Engaging with Loss Can Help Us Live More Fully with Stephen Jenkinson
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 550 Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
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Summary
In Western culture, topics surrounding death and dying are often considered taboo and are generally avoided in everyday conversations. But this reluctance to fully acknowledge and integrate death as a natural part of the human experience has rendered us less able to cope with the end of life and less prepared to show up for ourselves and the people around us as we inevitably navigate loss. But what if a more skillful engagement with death and grief could actually offer us a more mindful approach to living?
In this conversation, Nate is joined by Stephen Jenkinson, a cultural activist and author on the topic of grief, loss, and dying, to discuss his extensive work on grief literacy and the shortcomings of the dominant cultural attitudes towards death. Stephen reflects on his experiences as a palliative care counselor, offering insights on how to navigate the complexities of life and death, advocating for a more profound participation with grief.
What if we viewed grief as a skill rather than an affliction? What opportunities and insights become available to us as we more deeply understand and accept death as a part of life? In what ways does modern culture's reliance on hope act as a distraction from facing reality – and how does this harm us towards the end of life?
(Conversation recorded on June 12th, 2025)
About Stephen Jenkinson:
Stephen Jenkinson is a cultural activist and author on the topic of grief, loss, and dying. Along with his wife Nathalie Roy, Stephen co-founded the Orphan Wisdom School, where he writes and teaches about the skills of deep living, making human culture, and how to die and grieve well – skills he believes we have forgotten in our culture today.
Stephen holds a master's degree in theological studies from Harvard and an additional master's degree in social work from the University of Toronto. Additionally, he served for years as the program director of a palliative-care center in a major Toronto teaching hospital, where he provided counseling at hundreds of deathbeds. He is the author of many books, including the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, as well as his upcoming book titled Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | it's important to make sure that you don't turn grief and loss into one word because grieving doesn't |
| 0:05.4 | require loss to appear. You mourn this stuff. Of course you do. But the skillfulness is not how do you get |
| 0:13.9 | on the other side of the mourning. The skillfulness is the morning that you don't try to accelerate through it so that you're a more productive human |
| 0:22.9 | on the other side. Once grief is understood, there is no other side. Grief is your companion now, |
| 0:30.5 | not your adversary. You're listening to the Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. |
| 0:38.9 | On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. |
| 0:47.7 | By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. |
| 1:02.1 | Today I'm pleased to be joined by cultural activist and author Stephen Jenkinson |
| 1:07.8 | to share his decades of wisdom on the subject of grief, loss, and dying. |
| 1:14.6 | Along with his wife, Natalie Roy, Stephen co-founded the Orphan Wisdom School, where he writes and teaches about the skills of deep living, making human culture, and how to grieve and die well, skills he believes that our culture has forgotten |
| 1:30.1 | today. Stephen holds a master's degree in theological studies from Harvard University and an |
| 1:36.4 | additional master's degree in social work from the University of Toronto. Additionally, he served |
| 1:42.0 | for years as the program director of a palliative care center |
| 1:45.4 | in a major Toronto teaching hospital where he provided counseling at hundreds of deathbeds. |
| 1:52.4 | He is the author of many books, including the award-winning die-wise, a manifesto for sanity and soul, |
| 1:59.6 | as well as his upcoming book titled Matrimony, ritual, |
| 2:04.6 | cultural, and the heart's work. The message that Stephen has to share with us hits right at the |
| 2:10.4 | heart of modernity's biggest fears, which one might consider to be one of the drivers of what I |
| 2:16.7 | referred to as the economic superorganism, |
| 2:19.6 | fears of ending, fears of death, loss of control, and fears of living with the absence of something |
| 2:27.0 | that we once had in abundance. Stephen's work helps us remember how communities once lived |
| 2:33.9 | with the fundamental parts of being human, |
... |
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