Stephen Jenkinson is a former palliative care worker, cultural activist, and writer whose work explores the intersection of death, grief, meaning, elderhood, and ceremony. He has spent decades helping people navigate grief, death, and dying — both as the former director of palliative care at a major Canadian hospital and afterward through his Orphan Wisdom School, which seeks to cultivate deep life skills in an age of cultural fragmentation.
A recovered theologian, builder, stone carver, and farmer, Jenkinson brings the authority of lived experience to everything he touches. He’s traveled the continent as a ceremonial guide for weddings, funerals, and blessings — work born from people’s deep hunger for elders and ancestry. Along with musician Gregory Hoskins, he created Nights of Grief and Mystery, a musical storytelling ceremony that has evolved into an international journey exploring grief, authenticity, and what it means to live as if dying were not a failure.
He is the author of numerous books, including the award-winning Die Wise, Come of Age, and Matrimony. His latest work, Trembling, Still: The Awful Clarity of a Mind in Eclipse, offers a searing confrontation with his own mortality and degeneration as he navigates Parkinson’s disease.
In this conversation we speak about Stephen’s journey with Parkinson’s and the impact it has had on his mind, body, and life — how every case of Parkinson’s unfolds differently, and why he understands the work ahead of him as translation rather than endurance.
We explore what happens to the sense of self under neurological degeneration, whether the voice that arrives in illness is a stranger or God, and when it is okay to die. We get into the polarities of trying and accepting, and how one might navigate them more skillfully without collapsing into either resignation or fight.
Stephen shares his experience with Ibogaine, why he passed on the Toad (5-MeO-DMT), and what psychedelic experience does and doesn’t offer someone facing mortality directly. We also explore how Stephen stays grounded in healthy skepticism without falling into cynicism, what lies beyond hope and his new record Caldera with Gregory Hoskins along with the upcoming North American tour.
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