I got very close to a woman who was dying in hospice care when I was writing “Izzy & Lenore. She was quite beautiful and had the most remarkable sense of humor, and I think I had a crush on her, she was so charismatic and bright and brave and we talked so easily. I loved seeing her with Izzy. She loved dogs and we battled all the time about whether they had souls or not and whether they thought like humans. The last time I saw her – she was 87 and dying from congenital heart disease – she asked me if I was ready for her to go. Well, no, I said, not really.

“Well,”she said, smiling for me that one last time, raising her eyebrow,”what did you expect?”  Don’t waste time mourning me, she said, when there were so many miserable people out there – dead men and women walking, she said. Cry for them. It was her time and she had been given the gift of a great life.  It was a great question she put to me, a powerful statement. It made quite an impression. When I came by the next morning, the house was empty, and she was gone. That was the worst thing about hospice, you rarely got to say goodbye.

I made a vow after my hospice work to write about death once in awhile because it is such a taboo in America, and people approach it in so particular and depressing a way. Politicians never mention it, and you don’t see much about it on TV or in the movies. If it doesn’t happen around you, you might never know in America that anybody was ever going to die. Perhaps this is why people almost always seemed stunned by it, as if they never expected it to happen. As if being sad is the only way to think of it, to talk about it.  Yesterday and today I found myself dealing with death and I wanted to share some thoughts about it.

My thoughts – they don’t need to be yours, of course. They are likely not.

A friend of mine, a writer died of cancer yesterday. He was 78 and he had been very good to me. A mutual friend called up, stunned, and said you won’t believe this, but Daniel died today. I thought but did not say, yes, what did you expect? I felt a surge of sadness and then I smiled at the wonderful life this gifted man led. Why didn’t my friend mention that?  Another friend told me on the phone in a shocked and grieving way that a photographer had died. He was 87 and had a wonderful and productive life, and I thought the same thing when I heard her sad voice: what did you expect? Was he suppose to live forever? Why can’t we be happy that he had such a good and productive life?

And this morning, someone I don’t know well e-mailed me that her father had died in the nursing home where he had been confined with Alzheimer’s for nearly a decade. She seemed completely unprepared for this – devastated she said, even though she had told me so often his spirit had left years ago and she could hardly bear to visit him –  and I thought of my friend in hospice, smiling at me: “well, what did you expect?” Why, I wondered, can we not feel some gratitude for the lives people give us, for the time we have.

Am I cold? Detached? Hiding my grief? Maybe. I understand grief, having lost people close to me as well, children and friends and parents, and seen it my work as a reporter,  in hospice as well as life. I respect it, and anyone who wishes it is entitled to it.

But I am estranged from this idea of death as an unnatural shock. I believe death is natural, inevitable, the twin brother of life. Everything alive – every flower, animal, person that we know and love will die – including me. I have come in my life to not be stunned by death, to celebrate the gift of life instead, as the Quakers taught me to do. As my friend in hospice taught me to do.

But I do grieve. I know so many people who are still alive who are, as my friend pointed out, long dead and still walking. They have given up on dreams, on life, on promise. They are enslaved by work they hate, fear that suffocates, people who discourage them and make them feel small.  They believe the search for money is the point of their lives, and they are trapped in the search for security, the great American Ephemera,  the Land Of Equal Insecurity In The Corporate Nation. I  do think it right to grieve for them sometimes, the people T. S. Eliot called “The Hollow Men,” the people who are trapped in grey and angry lives – loveless,  unlived and unfulfilled. Because that is truly sad to me, that is heart-breaking. That did not have to be.

I think I would rather mourn for them than for the people who lived out their lives and followed the inevitable path every one of us will take. To live an empty life – that is not what we ought to expect.