I’ve been working for years on my inner self, my spiritual self, my understanding of myself and the world, through therapy, solitude, meditation, reading and studying.

It has taken me a long time to make any progress at all, and some of you have been good enough to share the experience with me. You know where I started and where I am.

I feel that in recent years, an idea and understanding of my world has been crystallizing and is internalizing, and, now lives inside of me, is part of me, in  my center, and in my subconscious.

I am learning to respect life and accept it, and it may be the most important thing I have learned, it evolved out of my mental illness.

Death, sickness, political turmoil, human folly and tragedies are part of the cycle of life. I believe there is  magnetism and power to lie and to nature, and that we too often fail consciously or unconsciously to yield do it.

This used to be an intellectual, or exterior goal. But in recent years and months, it has become absorbed into my consciousness, it is a natural, organic part of the my psyche.

When my world fell apart, I was challenged to accept who I was, and stop hiding from it, and that was the beginning of rebirth for me. It was an almost unbearable thing to face, but I saw then that it was life, and it needed respect and acceptance before it could be helped.

Over time, this idea evolved and deepened.

I remember first articulating this idea out loud later, just a few years ago, in the hours before my open heart surgery, for many people a time in introspection and revelation, since there may not be more time. Maria asked me how I was, as we held hands while I was rolled into surgery, and in the seconds before I was anesthetized. Her beautiful face was the last thing that I saw.

She asked me if I was afraid, and I said, somewhat curiously,  because I have often been afraid, that I was not afraid.  I wasn’t posturing or rolling in bravado. I wasn’t afraid. I completely accepted whatever was waiting for on the other side of the door.

I  honor my life, I said, and I  respect life,  and I will respect whatever it has in store for me. And I felt a great peace and calm inside of me.

I accept life, I thought, and this is part of it. Life and death and sickness and illness are as much a part of life as breathing and flowers and love and happiness. We get one, we get the other. I can’t only accept what feels good to me.

I believe we are taught to disrespect life, as we do in movies, politics, on the news. We are always surprised by it, we lament it and mourn it and often fool ourselves into thinking we can hide from it or alter it with money or science or will.

I remember a decade ago when one of my dogs died, and people wrote to me troubled and angry that I had not done more,  tried more, spent more. One women wrote and begged me to explore new options and treatments that she knew of. I told her I didn’t need to be begged by strangers to love my dog and do the best for him, that was an intensely personal thing for me, not something I needed to be told to do.

I remember a relative upset that I did show enough grief or practice enough ritual to honor the death of a relative.  The family was sitting in mourning for a week, rending garments, covering up mirrors, weeping and expressing disbelief.

He was shocked when I said but this is life, what did we expecting. Why are we so angry and unyielding when life appears and reveals itself to us? Can any of us really say we won’t be in the same place? We don’t get to choose when.

Recently, a friend told me she could never be happy in a county with President Trump, and this startled and saddened me. No politicians defines my happiness, and I have found enormous happiness, love and meaning in a country presided over by President Trump, even as he troubles me in so many ways.

Part of respecting life for me is accepting that I do not always get my way, in life or politics or anything else I have ever attempted.

I have written before that I am grateful for every day of my life with dogs, I do not remember their anniversaries or turn their lives into sadness, they bring nothing but joy to me. I am, I suppose, a freak in this way, but this notion has only grown and deepened in me. Loss and grief strengthens my center, I honor it and accept it.

My wish for my loved ones and friends when I go is to celebrate my full and challenging life, and  hopefully be grateful for it on my behalf and maybe their own. I  hope my death is not a misery to people- that would be a failure on my part –  but a celebration of lif, a time to laugh and shake heads and trade outrageous stories.

After all, this is the one place we are all going, the one thing we will all do.  I don’t want to encounter it as a shock, like some monster popping out of the bushes in the dark of night.

What a profound relief and gift to accept it as being as natural as an apple falling from a tree.  To respect it rather than dread it.

I bow to life and honor it, I don’t wish to hide from it, deny it, or be saved from it. A natural life is a life filed with joy and triumph and meaning, and also loss and disappointment and suffering.

This is a big idea for me and it has shaped a growing part of my thinking for several years now, it affects how I grieve and mourn the loss of people, and the loss of dogs, and the losses I have experienced in my own life and body as I grow older.

I believe we live in a society that teaches us  to deny life and disrespect disease and death, which few of us ever see in modern times. There are always people who think they can manipulate life and death, perform miracles, find cures, scoff at nature, search for victory, that there are always solutions out there that defy reality, if only we won’t quit.

We think money and science will  rescue us from the inevitable fate of humans. We are stunned by death and illness, we hide from it, force our loved ones to die out of sight, we and our children and our culture teach us there is always a way to trick life. Sooner or later, we will all face this lie.

The politicians and movies and media run from death, it is a taboo. Marketing departments hate it, corporations want nothing to do with it, the old and the dying don’t buy things and advertisers never care to see them or attract them, their purchasing time is short.

In my hospice work, or in my assisted care therapy work, I meet family members all the time who tell their exhausted and suffering parents to “hang in there.”  to not “be a quitter,” while the exhausted patients pray for relief and release.

Online the great home of the amateur diagnosticians and rainmakers – they don’t need to ride around in horse-drawn buggies any longer – , there are countless wizards and experts and shamans and profits pitching rebirth and resurrections, solutions and prescriptions, diagnoses and testimonies that vanquish disease, prolong life, disrespect and dishonor life.

They are the prophets of false hope, they deny me the opportunity to confront our mortality or see the beautiful and rewarding, and inevitable elements of death.

But I can only deal with death and illness with any kind of grace when I constantly pretend it can be altered or stopped or prolonged.

Should I not have an honest intercourse with life? Am I not made of life itself, of water and vegetables and energy?

Respecting life has grounded me and centered me. I am grateful for what I have, and for as long as it lasts. I will do the best I can for as long as I can.

And when I can’t do the best any longer I  hope I can summon the grace to honor and respect life. And respect it. It is so much better than living in fear and dread.