Family history is often associated with health and doctor visits: “Do you have a family history of cancer or heart disease?” But this doesn’t scrape the surface of what the phrase means.

Our sense of heritage is rapidly disappearing, asserts Stephen Jenkinson, author, storyteller, farmer and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School. He describes the current and emerging older generation (Boomers) as having an “amnesia of ancestry” — something that can’t be cured by dementia breakthroughs.

“What we suffer from most is culture failure and deep family story, phantom or sham rites of passage, no instruction on how to live with each other or with the world around us or with our dead or with our history,” he says.

Staring Into Nothingness

It’s challenging to shine an acceptable light on a topic such as end of life. We’ve approached death and dying in ways HECM professionals may find helpful for the seniors you serve. Some key posts include:

Death, Be Not Proud (dying the way one chooses)

The Final Frontier (preparing for one’s own death; info from Deathing: An Intelligent Alternative for the Final Moments of Life)

Facing the Inevitable with Grace and Wit (review of book, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?)

And In the End… (information from Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and cutting edge end-of-life preparatory tools)

Care of the dying, and how we die when it is our turn, is “where our immense technical medical wizardry and mastery is visited upon you and those you love, and where the mythic poverty of our time comes to show itself,” opines Jenkinson. “They are the place where our ability to be a people is forged, or fails. They are where we are most ourselves, and most alone.

“Wherever there is that much at stake there is at least that much to learn. So it is a necessary and proper thing that all of us learn about dying and about death, about all of the before and the after, well before the time of being tested and told comes.”

Wisdom from the Trenches

Jenkinson isn’t just a poet with a purpose; for five years, he led the counseling team for Canada’s largest home-based palliative care program, working with hundreds of people and witnessing a “wretched anxiety” around the end of life. During this time, others who worked with the dying began asking him to speak about “finding meaning” at the end of life.

The challenge, explains Jenkinson, is in the language itself: “finding” meaning, as though it’s something that must be sought, that’s hidden, that we must pursue before we die. But, he asks, what if meaning is not found, but made? This calls us to accept certain difficult truths, such as: life must and will continue — even though we will not. The nature of life is ephemeral; thus, death feeds life.

“What has to die is your refusal for things to end. If that dies, life can be fed by that,” says Jenkinson.

This is a hard perspective for most people to hold, he acknowledges. We’ve touched on life, death and story a few times, but it does take a certain degree of personal growth to be able to view one’s own life and impending death with this larger, objective view.

These beautiful lines from Leonard Cohen encapsulate the dance of life, death, and purpose:

“So come, my friends, be not afraid

We are so lightly here.

It is in love that we are made;

In love we disappear.”