Literature

Trembling, Still
Larger View
Buy Online Find Locally

Trembling, Still: The Awful Clarity of a Mind in Eclipse

Author Stephen Jenkinson

"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

About The Author

Stephen Jenkinson is a culture activist, worker, and author. He has taught internationally and is the creator of the Orphan Wisdom Schook, cofounded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. He apprenticed with a master storyteller as a young man and received a master’s degree in theology at Harvard University and a master’s of social work from the University of Toronto. Stephen has worked extensively with dying people and their families, formerly serving as the director of palliative care at Mount Sinai Hospital of Toronto. In 2023, Stephen received a Distinguished Alumni Honours Award from Harvard University for “helping people navigate grief, exploring the liminal space between life and death, and connecting humanity through ceremony and storytelling.” 

Stephen is the author of Reckoning (co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson in 2022), A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching from 2013), How It All Could Be: A Workbook for Dying People and Those Who Love Them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life (a live teaching from 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002). He was a contributing author to Palliative Care – Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007). Stephen’s newest book is Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work (published by Sounds True). 

  • Publish Date: July 07, 2026
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Category: Biography & Autobiography - Memoirs
  • Publisher: Chelsea Green
  • Trim Size: 6 x 9
  • Pages: 240
  • US Price: $28.00
  • CDN Price: $38.00
  • ISBN: 978-1-64502-453-8
Buy Online Find Locally
Back To Top

Reviews

"Trembling, Still is jazz-writing at its most turbulently brilliant; tuneful and mournful, poignant and funny, heart-rending and mind-grabbing, skillfully improvisational, eloquent and compelling. Thank you, Stephen Jenkinson: only you could have written this, and I offer you my gratitude, paltry recompense for such a masterful gift to us all."—Gabor Maté, MD, coauthor of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

"Maybe Stephen’s greatest. His writing is infused with strange staccato jumps then river-strong flow, with hawkeyed storytelling leading us on. There’s dread judgement but also religious wonder, and 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

"A rare, real-time chronicle of receiving and reckoning with a neurodegenerative diagnosis, Trembling, Still is a study in how to remain awake, accountable and alive while the ground shifts. This book steadies us in this life, reminding us to tend without turning away."—Elena Brower, best-selling author of Hold Nothing and Practice You

"Even in its printed form, Trembling, Still bears the trace of an unsteady hand – raw, intimate, and unprotected. It invites the reader into the friction of receiving devastating news in the middle of an ordinary day, where life continues even as everything has changed, and charges even the simplest tasks with a great longing. It is a sober reminder that the ride does not go on forever – and a rare, unsentimental guide to what might matter while it still does. What emerges for me is a hard but generous question: how are we using the days when we still can?"—Mattias Olsson, founder and filmmaker, Campfire Stories

"Stephen has always been a bird with more than two wings, a rare creature. Given the pressing circumstances, he has recently learned to breathe underwater. He uses his pen like a straw that connects him to the surface. He’s always eschewed superficial assurance. Now again. He keeps the transfusion running – his fancy stylograph is also a needle, and the ink is his soul’s blood."—Àlex Gómez-Marín, PhD, neuroscientist; head, Behavior of Organisms Laboratory, Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante

"In Trembling, Still, Stephen Jenkinson writes from the raw edge of a diagnosis with honesty and vulnerability. The book is a meditation on grief, dignity, and the fragile brilliance of being alive. For those willing to sit with uncertainty, sorrow, and the strange clarity that arises when the ground shifts beneath us, Trembling, Still serves as a profound companion through bewildering terrain. What emerges is not despair, but a fierce reckoning with what it means to live fully, even in the face of uncertainty."—Aditi Sethi, MD, founder and executive director, Emberlight: Center for Conscious Living & Dying in Asheville, NC

"What an antidote to the prescription pill – a script, a plea. More than anything, this book is faithful. In Stephen’s loving hands and radical generosity, Parkinson’s disease becomes lucid, transparent, touchable. As we are let in on his human act of befriending the beast, we befriend the befriending. Reading Trembling, Still will not give us more years, but it does have the power to root us deeper in this world as Stephen’s words turn flat Earth into round. This book is better than good; it is whole."—Rony Rof, MD, Sabar Health Hospital at Home, Israel

"There is extraordinary courage in this book, and extraordinary honesty. But what moves me most is its refusal of consolation. Jenkinson does not arrive at peace. He arrives at something harder and more trustworthy – a kind of sorrowing clarity that, as he writes, can fit you out for joy. I have seen that same quality in patients who find their way through existential crisis, not by resolving it, but by learning to inhabit it with full presence. In a culture of bypass, this is a direct, head-on wrestling with reality, and it is a pleasure to see how someone who has created some of the best maps actually traverses the territory.
"For anyone who works with the dying, loves someone who is ill, or simply has not yet figured out how to think about their own mortality – which is to say, most of us – Trembling, Still is essential reading."—Manish Agrawal, MD, MA, cofounder and CEO, Sunstone Therapies

"Those familiar with Jenkinson’s opus – listeners, readers, the counselled and consoled – may be unsettled by the profound unsettling Stephen recounts. Vulnerability is all too often dissonant in a culture obsessed with competence, perhaps all the more so when the one sharing their fears is assumed or expected to be unfailingly competent in the face of disassembly. Genuine devastation, as Stephen attests, brings with it a deep draught of frailty, it invites hard questions about consistency, it insists on a reckoning with the limitations of living, and it forces a fumbling acceptance of the inadequacy of much of our bodily being, and not least of button flies.
"Trembling, Still is, however, more than a wordsmith’s journal penned while he steers headlong into the storm of self-loss. It is an honouring of the beauty and brittleness of pottery, the resistance of beans, the affordances of having a hand in the provisioning of our daily bread, and it is an invitation and invocation to cultivate joy and gratitude in the midst of troubling times."—Jonathan M. Code, writer, teacher, kindler and craftsman

"He is a man of both words and phenomena; I savoured every expression of experience from the depths of sadness to the peaks of triumphs, from exquisite reflections on body and mind to relationships close and casual. Gifted with letters, this man’s words are authentic, masterful, painterly and poetic. Demanding life from his ailing body and confronting the terror of a failing mind, he wows."—Diane de Camps Meschino, MD, psychiatrist and artist; associate professor, University of Toronto

"As a practicing end-of-life counselor, I have found no text more insightful, more trustworthy, more honest, than Trembling, Still for its humble look into the abyss of neurodegeneration and lament. There are so few who have sat on both sides of the hospital consultation room’s desk that separates patient and practitioner and given us their account of the hurt of it all. Being of age and broken body to be obligated to inhabit both as well, I can confidently say that Trembling, Still is the truest account of the words the Rough Gods have spoken to anyone listening on either side of that desk."—Jonathan Heller, MS, CT, founder and director, Casa Ahava, the first hospice and palliative care home in Mozambique

Author Bookshelf: Stephen Jenkinson

Trembling, Still