Conflict is drama. So is death, anger, fear, loss and disappointment, money, love.

Technically speaking, drama is the quality of being dramatic. Mostly, I think, drama is the denial of life. Politics is a drama, so is the news, so is war. Drama is both crippling and blinding, and at it’s  worst, it separates human beings from one another in the coldest and most insensitive of ways.

I am familiar with drama, I spent much of my life in it, until one day I was able to begin to see it and begin to understand how unhealthy it is, how it speaks so powerfully to our refusal to accept the nature of life. Drama, for me, was narcissistic, it always kept me from understanding that nothing that happened to me was unique to me. We are, in fact, one thing.  Other people lost loved ones, got sick, were disappointed in love or life, saw parents age and die, lost dogs and cats, saw dreams crushed.

Drama has always been something of a problem for me, as I do not like it in me, nor do I care for it in others, yet it is everywhere around me. Online, in social media, in messages, in conversations with people on the street, on the news. Drama feeds fear just as surely as the wind feeds a forest fire.

A friend messaged me earlier in the week to say that she had to take the day off, because it was the fifth anniversary of the death of Samson, a Lab she loved dearly. She could never get another dog, she told me, it was too painful to think of him. She knew I would understand, she said, because I love my own animals so much.

I said nothing, rudeness is a drama all of it’s own. But I did not understand.  How selfish she was, I thought. I have lost dogs and donkeys and cats and people. Didn’t she know that? There are millions of dogs languishing in shelters, she could be loving one of them rather than clinging to mourning.

What did she think, I asked myself, that dogs would live forever? That her inability to move on with her life after so many years spoke not of dog love, but of her own health, her own life?  Perhaps because I am beginning to be old and save seen friends and relatives die, get sick, lose dogs, get laid off, go broke, die in car crashes and terrorist attacks, have surgery, get divorced, lose their children, grandparents, cousins and aunts, known pain and loss – just like I have –  I have turned away from drama and chosen acceptance instead.

I choose to celebrate what I have, not dwell in the realm of what I have lost.

Every day, people tell me or send me messages and stories about animals they have lost, people they have lost, jobs they have lost, disappointments they have suffered. Some are elegant, some are noble, some are beautiful, some are deep in drama.

Drama is the opposite of acceptance, I think. In hospice, I saw a 92 year-old mother begging to be taken home from her nursing home so she could give up her pills and treatments and die in peace, and everyone in her family set out to talk her out of it, to steal her choices, to laugh at her confusion, to patronize her desire to choose how to leave the world. They told her she was brave, strong, not a quitter. We love you, they said, hang on. When I visited, she would clasp my hand and beg me to help her go.

They were in drama, they simply could not accept that people die, and have a right to choose how they wish to leave the world. Drama is selfish, it is always about us, never about them. Death and loss always seems a shock and surprise, a stunning secret, even though it comes as often as the sun and the moon. And will come to every living thing on the earth.

Drama distances us from one another. When someone says they are devastated by the loss of a loved one or an animal and seek the soothing and comfort of others I do sympathize. Pain hurts. And I always wonder if they realize that every single person reading their story has suffered the same thing. We live in crisis and mystery, we are all one thing when it comes to loss and challenge and struggle. And joy and meaning and love as well.

I have learned to remind myself that everyone who reads my words has suffered every single thing I have suffered, or worse, or soon will. Suffering is never exclusively mine, drama is a space between my emotions and the feelings of others. Acceptance reminds of the unity of being a human being, the thing we all share. We will all lose our mothers and our fathers, some of our friends, so many of our dreams, the dogs and cats we love. We will all struggle with our bodies, wonder about death, worry about money.

What is a spiritual life, if not seeing the true nature of our lives? I will celebrate my life to the end of it. Life and death, joy and loss, are not different things, they are one thing.

I am working on this: I accept and embrace life, the good and the bad. Death is a part of life, so it loss. If and when I share the dramas of my life, it will hopefully always be with the recognition that no drama is mine alone, understanding this is the key to what it means to be a human being.