In the past few weeks, I’ve been taking photographs of an old farmhouse where the elderly woman who lived there, a farm wife, recently died.  The photographs were all through the windows, of lamps and tables, but many people knew right away what they were. These photos have touched a very deep chord in many people, who feel these images remind me of their parents, who are gone, and of their houses, which were cleaned up by loving children or family members, who collected the most intimate and beloved things and had the painful task of removing them, keeping some, auctioning or disposing of others.

These images often brought tears to the people who saw them, and instantly recognized their own experiences in the lamps, tables, mirrors and plants of their mothers and fathers. Photographs are like that, sometimes people just see their own lives in them.

I remember going into such a farmhouse as a hospice volunteer and Margaret, the 92-year-old woman who was near death, talking with me one after. Her daughters and sons were having a hard time with her impending death, she said, they were just shocked and stunned by it. “I wonder why?” she asked me. “I am 92. Nobody lives forever. Everyone seems so unprepared for it.” Margaret, like so many other hospice patients, told me she was ready to go, even eager to go. She had lived her life, her body was no longer working for her, and she never expected to live forever. Perhaps, we both said, older people were closer to death because it was closer to them. Their parents died in their homes, not nursing homes, and everyone had lost someone in one war or another.

I have had some beautiful exchanges about these photographs. One woman wrote that they made her cry, reminding her of the days she spent cleaning out her mother’s farmhouses. Did it have to be only sad? I asked, thinking of Margaret. We are all going to die and perhaps if our society didn’t avoid the subject of death so completely, it wouldn’t be such a surprise when people who have lived nearly a century pass on. She wrote back thanking me, saying yes, this was true, her mother had a wonderful life and died in her sleep at 84. It was the nature of life.  I have a friend who is demanding major surgery for his 94-year-old mother, suffering from a chronic and debilitating illness. We are not ready to let her go, he said. I wonder what she says. We do seemed stunned by death, even though it is one of the very few experiences we shall all share. As I age, I think about death, and I think the same think I do about life: it demands self-awareness and consideration if we want to do it well, not hiding.

Death is sad, of course, and how can it be happy when the people we love leave us? People tell me all the time that animals grieve, yet I have learned much from watching animals deal with death, and it is not to only mourn or lament loss. They are not surprised, do not mourn and grieve the way we do, in my experience. They are unsettled, aware, and then they acclimate and readjust. We want so much for them to feel the way we feel, and perhaps they do. I don’t think so. I don’t wish to live to be 100, and I hope that when I do die, the people around me remember the wonderful Quaker tradition of celebrating life, not mourning death. A life lived is a precious and sacred thing, an ode to joy and humanity as well as loss and grief. I hope I am remembered in that way, and that there is a lot of whooping, head-shaking and laughter when I leave.  I hope nobody keeps me alive because they are not ready to let me go. My photos are sad to me, too, but also affirming. Testaments to lives lived.