And so this is what I believe about grief, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that we will all lose someone we love dearly and cannot live without, if we have not already. I would like to tell you that you will get over it, but that would be a lie,  you will never fully heal.

Grief does not destroy us, it reveals us. Life and death are parts of the same thing,  life is sacred as well, death gives it meaning and reminds us to cherish it. The prophets and the Quakers and the Buddhists teach us that we can learn to celebrate the lives we have lost, not only to mourn them.

Grief connects us to life in the most profound way, and to the deepest kind of friendship, empathy, love and understanding. The good news is that the people we lose will never really leave, they will live forever in our hearts and souls. It does get better.

I am 68 years old now, I have lost two children in my life and countless friends, relatives, mentors,  loved ones, colleagues and family members as time goes by.  I have been a hospice volunteer for seven years, and I have seen a lifetime of death and grieving in that work. Sometimes I just have to stop for awhile.

Death and illness are sometimes the currency of life, we will all die, we all have lost people, animals, dreams in our lives. Someone recently suggested that I didn’t know what it was like to lose someone close to me, I didn’t know how to tell her this wasn’t so. I never want to brag about loss.  Grief is the universal experience, we all feel it different ways, we all have to navigate it our own way, there is no one way. Everyone has it worse than i do.

Earlier this year, death brushed against me again, it came close. My friend Paul Moshimer, the very beloved husband of Pamela Rickenbach Moshimer, our sister and the director and co-founder of Blue Star Equiculture. In the year before he died – he hung himself on a big and beautiful tree behind the Blue Star farmhouse – we became friends, and were drawing close. We were always honest with one another. Paul and I were both excited about the prospects for spending more time together, we said so often.

There aren’t many men like Paul Moshimer, and every one of them is precious. The death of one of these very special men – open, warm, generous and loving – is a kind of loss all of it’s own, often irreplaceable. He joined our Fabulous Old Men’s Club shortly before his death, he only made it to one meeting. There are two of us left. I don’t know about men. They always find a way to avoid loving one another.

Paul told me he thought I was brave, a truth-teller, and he wanted to learn how to write so he could stand in his own truth, and face up to the cruel people who were so relentlessly harassing him and Pamela for their belief that working horses should work. We were planning to do some writing together. He wanted to defend Pamela and the work she was doing and he knew how sensitive she was to this kind of irrational and disconnected ugliness. He felt it also, I am convinced it played a role in his decision to end his own life. Hatred kills.

Paul was a friend, but it was in no way my loss in the way it was Pamela’s loss or that of his daughters and many friends who knew him longer than I did. I am careful not to steal the grief of others, or seek sympathy where there is none needed or due.

Suicide is one of the most unfathomable and complex things to grieve over, the psychologists all say. We always feel we should have known something and done something. We must learn to accept that we are not God, we cannot change fate or destiny. We make our own decisions. I understand that I will never know what happened, even though just a little while before his death, he sat in my living room and we talked through the night about our failures, our dreams, our hopes and wishes for life. Men don’t get to spend a lot of evenings like that, I will not forget it.

Paul left no note, told no one of his plans, I talked to him almost every day in one form or another and he had visited me at the farm shortly before his death. I knew he was troubled sometimes, and sad.

He was eager to join in supporting a young farmer named Joshua Rockwood, fighting for his life against the secret police of the animal movement – they had informed on him and sparked his arrest on 13 almost equally unjust and dumb counts of animal cruelty. Three of his horses were seized and he is struggling to keep his life together. The day before he died, Paul messaged me and asked me to tell Joshua that he would be happy to come down to New York with his trailer and get his horses back from the rescue farm that had impounded them and was asking for tens of thousands of dollars to bring them back.

I was standing in Joshua’s pasture when Blue Star called and the voice on the other end said, “I am sorry to tell you that Paul is dead, he committed suicide this morning, Pamela wants you to call her.” I thought my heart would stop.

Friday, Pamela came to stay with  us, she brought two beautiful horses from Blue Star to be part of our Open House. We talked for awhile, and then she said she had a present for me. It was a black jacket Paul loved and always wore. It was from Old Navy. It fit me perfectly. My first thought was that I couldn’t wear this, it was too personal, too laden with memory and the life of another person. It wasn’t my jacket, and it brought Paul’s death right back to me in a very personal way. Grief works like that, it lurks in the marrow and rises like the mist.

Then I put the jacket on. It just fit. It was so comfortable, and I was startled to feel close to Paul again in a very new and different way. I was angry with him, as many people are when people kill themselves. But putting the jacket on, that faded away, and I loved him once more like a brother.

We own our lives, no one can tell us what to do with them. But suicide often seems like a betrayal, a failure, even an abandonment. It challenges us and our sense of grieving in the most profound way, because we must find the forgiving and understanding and tolerant parts of ourselves if we are to live with it.

In putting on this jacket, I felt love for Paul, and compassion and understanding. I felt he needed to go, and it was his right to go, I didn’t need to understand, he didn’t owe me any explanation. Pamela believes she will meet Paul again, she is a deeply spiritual human. I am not so sure about that, but I did feel wearing that jacket that he was not completely gone, he was walking with me in that jacket, out herding the sheep this morning. I almost texted him a photo of Fate working, we often texted each other the images of our lives.

For the first time since Paul died, I cried out there in the pasture, and I talked to him. I made it through two memorials without tears, but wearing that jacket opened me up, like a big pump on a well.

Okay, I said, we aren’t going to do all of those great things together, I guess, but we can cherish and appreciate the great things we did together. Until you had to leave. I’m not blaming you or shaking a finger at you, at least not as much as I was. You might have said goodbye. I guess you couldn’t. For all I know, you didn’t even have time.

I know how much you loved Pamela, that was so evident and I know how much you wanted to protect her from the broken and hateful and angry people of the world. I will do my best. And I wanted you to know how much I loved you. I will always think of that in your jacket. I never got to tell you, the curse of the male.

And thanks for the jacket. It fits like a glove.