“Stephen Jenkinson reimagines dying” (2018)

The inestimable Stephen Jenkinson on the subject of death as a god:

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.

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