Griefwalker, Tim Wilson, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
Since Steve died I’ve been very interested in death, dying and grief. How it happens, what happens afterwards, how grief feels, how people handle it, how I handled it.
This documentary introduces us to Stephen Jenkinson, once the leader of a palliative care counselling team at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Through his daytime job, he has been at the deathbed of well over 1,000 people. What he sees over and over, he says, is “a wretched anxiety and an existential terror” even when there is no pain. Indicting the practice of palliative care itself, he has 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.
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