Griefwalker

In his daytime job as leader of a palliative care counselling team at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, Stephen Jenkinson has been at the death bed of well over a thousand people. What he sees over and over, he says, is "a wretched anxiety and an existential terror" even when there is no pain. And he indicts the practice of palliative care itself, based as it is mostly on pain and symptom management, for a disastrous depletion of meaning. Thoroughly, if unconventionally prepared, Jenkinson (Harvard Divinity graduate, social worker, sculptor, author, blues musician and storyteller) has now made it his life's mission to change the way we die - to turn the act of dying from denial and resistance into an essential part of life. Griefwalker follows the stories of three dying people and their end of life encounters with Jenkinson.