Stephen Jenkinson

From the award-winning author of Die Wise comes a poetic, meditative and honest memoir that dares to grapples with the indescriminate nature of illness Stephen Jenkinson is perhaps best known for his work helping people navigate grief, death, and dying. Now, he confronts an “undoing” of his own in the form of the degenerative neurological condition known as Parkinson’s disease. In Trembling Still Stephen details his experience—beginning with his diagnosis—through a collection of musings, stories, and reflections on life and illness, both poignant and poetic as his fine-motor skills and cognitive abilities begin to decline. Written as a series of entries beginning January 3, 2024, and ending with an epilogue dated July 17, 2025, Trembling Still is a lyrical and meditative journey that will find its way both to Stephen’s well-established audience and to a broader readership.

In a time when communal rituals and cultural ceremonies fail, longtime scholar, storyteller, and ceremonialist Stephen Jenkinson asks what it means to lose cultural inheritance. In examining matrimony and its ritual twin, patrimony, Matrimony contemplates culture-making, building and preserving cultural memory, and the ache of living in a world bereft of meaning and connection. There is a real and palpable consequence to turning away from public ceremony - and not just for the celebrants. “Matrimony and patrimony are village rites, a communal affirmation of the village’s ways of going on, sometimes not quite knowing how to,” shares Jenkinson. “The village needs and deserves a rite of public recognition of the seismic change in its life that matrimony means to make.” Privatising love, turning matrimony into a social institution barren of almost all substance, and flattening rituals into convenient events that fit into the routine of modern living erodes our connections and commitment to community and compromises our use as citizens of a troubled time. The way forward, then, is to learn and reclaim our cultural ceremonies and their meaning. Through witty stories, insightful history, and meditative questions, Matrimony invites us to contemplate the significance of matrimony, ceremony, and cultural articulation - and how to redeem them for future generations.

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. Come of Age does not offer tips on how to be a better senior citizen or how to be kinder to our elders. Rather, with lyrical prose and incisive insight, Stephen Jenkinson explores the great paradox of elderhood in North America: how we are awash in the aged and yet somehow lacking in wisdom; how we relegate senior citizens to the corner of the house while simultaneously heralding them as sage elders simply by virtue of their age. Our own unreconciled relationship with what it means to be an elder has yielded a culture nearly bereft of them. Meanwhile, the planet boils, and the younger generation boils with anger over being left an environment and sociopolitical landscape deeply scarred and broken. Taking on the sacred cow of the family, Jenkinson argues that elderhood is a function rather than an identity--it is not a position earned simply by the number of years on the planet or the title "parent" or "grandparent." As with his seminal book Die Wise, Jenkinson interweaves rich personal stories with iconoclastic observations that will leave readers radically rethinking their concept of what it takes to be an elder and the risks of doing otherwise. Part critique, part call to action, Come of Age is a love song inviting us--imploring us--to elderhood in this time of trouble. That time is now. We're an hour before dawn, and first light will show the carnage, or the courage, we bequeath to the generations to come.

Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the page and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well. Die Wise is for those who will fail to live forever. Dying well, Jenkinson writes, is a right and responsibility of everyone. It is not a lifestyle option. It is a moral, political, and spiritual obligation each person owes their ancestors and their heirs. Die Wise dreams such a dream, and plots such an uprising. How we die, how we care for dying people, and how we carry our dead: this work makes our capacity for a village-mindedness, or breaks it. Table of ContentsThe Ordeal of a Managed DeathStealing Meaning from DyingThe Tyrant HopeThe Quality of LifeYes, But Not Like ThisThe WorkSo Who Are the Dying to You? Dying Facing HomeWhat Dying Asks of Us AllKidsAh, My Friend the Enemy