Trembling Still

"Turbulently brilliant; tuneful and mournful, poignant and funny, heart-rending and mind-grabbing, skillfully improvisational, eloquent and compelling."—Gabor Maté, MD, author of The Myth of Normal From the award-winning author of Die Wise comes a raw and poignant account of the indiscriminate nature of illness—and what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a diagnosis. Stephen Jenkinson is perhaps best known for his extensive work 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 and amnesia. Now, the unimaginable has descended upon the “Griefwalker” himself. In Trembling, Still, Stephen takes to the page in the wake of his diagnosis with the degenerative neurological condition known as Parkinson’s disease—the Beast, as he comes to know it. “There’s a bit of breathing room that comes with seeing life’s lessons coming on from a distance, through the mediation of others,” Stephen writes. But this book is not an account of life’s lessons from a distance; it is the picture of what it is to be in the arms of the Beast oneself. 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 of reckoning that will resonate with anyone who has experienced or witnessed decline. In illness, there is pain, confusion, grace, dissolution, joy, heart-wrenching grief, light. There’s sorrow. Then there’s the soul’s work. "Never, once, does the book lose its mesmeric hold. This is not a domestic document. If you seek the unexpected, seek this."—Martin Shaw, author of Liturgies of the Wild