GRIEFWALKER

Canadian Author & Culture Activist Stephen Jenkinson brings Griefwalker, a National Film Board of Canada documentary to Athens.
Stephen Jenkinson is the subject of Griefwalker, directed by Tim Wilson (2008).

Griefwalker is a lyrical, poetic portrait of Stephen’s work with dying people. Filmed over a twelve year period, Griefwalker shows Jenkinson in teaching sessions with doctors and nurses, in counselling sessions with dying people and their families, and in meditative and often frank exchanges with the film’s director while paddling a birch bark canoe about the origins and consequences of his ideas for how we live and die.‘Griefwalker’ is currently being translated into Greek.

MORE ABOUT STEPHEN JENKINSON ~ Author ~ Master of Ceremony ~ Culture activist ~ Storyteller ~ Off-grid small-scale Farmer ~ Carver ~ Keeper of the Great Hall ~
Jenkinson teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School.

For years, after apprenticing to a master storyteller as a young man, acquiring a master’s degree in theology from Harvard Divinity school and another in social work from the University of Toronto, Stephen Jenkinson led the palliative care department in a major Canadian hospital and was assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. He has worked extensively with caregivers, dying people and their families. Whilst sitting at the deathbeds of over a thousand people, he encountered again and again what he called a “wretched anxiety.” Rather than any one individual’s personal issue with dying, Jenkinson understood this as symptomatic of a cultural absence, a death phobia, a grief illiteracy.

These experiences served to distil a number of questions: Has it always been this hard to die? When do we really begin to die, and what are we supposed to do then? How is it that grief is a skill, something to be learned and practised? Those questions and more spawned several books. He is the subject of the National Film Board of Canada feature length film documentary, Griefwalker (Dir.T.Wilson).

He is the author of Reckoning, co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson (2022), and A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015 and translated into Hebrew and Turkish), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching from 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Homecoming – The Haiku Sessions (Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life – (a live teaching from 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002). He was a contributing author to Palliative Care – Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007).
Lost Nation Road (Dir.I.MacKenzie) is a glimpse behind-the-scenes of a soulful mystery train. His Nights of Grief and Mystery world tours, with fellow Canadian singer/ songwriter Gregory Hoskins, are odes to wonder, love letters for the willingness to know endings. 2023 World Tour Dates
Read more about Stephen here.

Stephen Jenkinson’s new book is COME OF AGE: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (July 2018) video link
In his landmark provocative style, Stephen Jenkinson makes the case that we must birth a new generation of elders, one poised and willing to be true stewards of the planet and its species.
To purchase a hard copy or download Stephen’s audio book visit orphanwisdom.com

The Making of Humans video clip short films by director/producer Ian MacKenzie

Die Wise A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul is Stephen’s book about grief, and dying, and the great love of life. (2015 Nautilus Award Winner)

Dying well is not a matter of enlightened self-interest or personal preference. Dying well must become an obligation that living people and dying people owe to each other and to those to come.