1937 – 2016 · A portrait
A poet who began sitting with dying people in the 1970s argued that facing death directly, not avoiding it, was part of living fully — a case he made for decades with his wife Ondrea.
Around 1980, with support from Ram Dass's Hanuman Foundation, he and Ondrea founded the Dying Project, offering counseling to dying people and their families — one of the first organized efforts of its kind.
In 1982 they published Who Dies?, drawn from years of sitting at bedsides, arguing that meeting death and grief with direct awareness, rather than avoidance, was part of living fully — not something to manage from a distance.
For decades afterward they sat directly with dying people and their families, treating grief as its own long process deserving attention, not something to rush past.
Stephen Levine died in 2016. Hospice and palliative-care writers still cite his and Ondrea's decades of bedside work as an early, influential model for facing death openly rather than turning away from it.