Something I’ve learned in recent years.

The more time I spend in the presence of aging and death, the less i fear either. My time talking to the sick and the dying has greatly enriched and enhanced my life, despite the fact that for most of my life me and everyone around me was taught to avoid doing either.

We are taught that death is our enemy, but I no longer believe. It is living an angry or meaningless life that is the enemy, or living for money, which is the new slavery.

Somebody – I think it was Shakespeare – said that we all owe God a death. That’s the deal, that’s the toll and the contract for living. We can hide from it, whine about it, run from it, but it will always be there, just around the corner, waiting for us to show up.

And we don’t get to choose when.

In her beautiful book on hope, Anne Lamott writes in her honest book “Almost Everything: Notes On Hope,” that the people we lose on this side of eternity, “whom you can no longer call or text, will live again fully in your heart and the the world. They will make you smile…”

In our culture, we are taught from our first days to hide from death and run from the elderly at they approach the edge of life. The dying are hidden away in hospitals and hospice rooms and  nursing homes for the most part, the elderly locked away and hidden from view, all in the name of protecting their privacy from us.

But in my hospice and assisted care therapy work, I learned that anything that is scary or disturbing becomes much less scary and disturbing once I confront it, investigate it, and approach with it. My therapy work has been my spiritual work, it has opened me up to life.

I have had some of the most beautiful conversations and moments in my life in hospice, as liberated and spiritual people prepared to leave the world. And I have come to love the elderly people I work with at the Mansion, they are funny, warm, loving and wise. Some of them are deliciously odd and unpredictable. They love to sing, they love to dance, they love to laugh. Some of them even love me, a kind of love and connection I have rarely felt in my life.

And believe me, they know what love is and isn’t.

Talking to the sick and the elderly has given my life a much wanted spiritual depth and dimension.

It has taken away my fear of aging and dying, my discomfort with the sick and the very old. The wrinkled faces are beautiful to me now, it is a joy to photograph them, talk to them, help them. I used to find them ugly, even repulsive. I was blind to them, in part because I rarely saw them.

Today, I went to the Mansion and Ruth gestured to me to come over and talk to her.

“Do you still give away those envelopes and cards  you bring here?” Yes, I do, I said. “Can you get some Valentine’s Day Cards for me, there are people who I love.” Of course, I said, I can’t imagine a better thing to bring.

They love, too, just like the rest of us.

It is not a healthy or spiritual thing to run from death or hide from the elderly, where almost all of us will be in a blink. I spend a lot of time with old people now, and we have fun. They know a lot of things, and yes, they need help sometimes. They teach me something every time I see them. That’s the core of it, I want to know what they know and see what they have seen.

I understand that the young have no great need to think much about death, or get too close to it. Death is creepy when you have so much to live for, so much life ahead.  But they don’t  have to hide from it either. That just makes the inevitable awakening all the harder.

A half century ago, young people saw death all the time, their parents and grandparents died in the next bed. We don’t do that anymore, and when the mask comes off, it is often a hard and terrifying place to be.

My spiritual breakthroughs have almost all come from what I  have seen of sickness, struggle, loss and death. That’s when we open our eyes and hearts.

“The reason to draw close to death,” writes Lamott, “is to practice living and finding in the soul.”

This, she adds,  grows our muscles for living.