Pain is a gift to me; it has made every good thing in my life possible. The past few weeks have shaken me and opened me up to the richness of life and the need for gratitude and acceptance.

Pain has opened my heart and helped me to grow and think. I go to the place of my pain and work from there.

Some of the people I’ve known the longest and trusted the most and relied on the heaviest are dead or dying, and I am working to understand that and how I need to respond to it.

For years, I’ve expected this very spiritual challenge, especially during my hospice work. It’s one thing to look ahead to death, quite another to find it all around me in the normal world.

This is the time to enter the New Country, to make the change.

Death is not a surprise to me; it’s not a shock. I don’t need people to feel my sorrow or my loss or to feel sorry for me.

We will all soon enough be where my friend is, you me, everybody else. And I’m not dead. And I’m not sad.

The job of people who care about me is to accept me. If they can’t, then to leave me.  It’s as simple as that. My job is to return the favor. For me, acceptance has been one of the most difficult of the spiritual challenges. I am always working on it, one step at a time.

Yesterday I explained to one dear friend what hospice was really about: hospice is all about making people comfortable, not killing them. My friend was really asking me if he would die and if hospice meant death was imminent.

He trusted me to tell him. I had no answer. I said I wasn’t calling as a hospice volunteer but as a friend.  If hospice work taught me anything, it was this: I am not God, I will never be God. Never, ever tell the dying how they feel or should feel.

I told my friend about the new country. He seemed shaken, that place we cross over to when we grow and change. He was interested.

We see our friends differently when they die, I see. I never thought of the two of us as being especially close. As he is getting ready to leave, I see that our friendship was so much more important than I could grasp.

This old cliche is true; sometimes, you have to lose something to see what you had.

I talk to my friend every day; we avoid the sad stuff and talk about life. I feel closer to him than ever. We talk in the way real friends talk.

The other day, he started to say something critical about someone we both know. He never says anything critical about anyone. “It’s okay,” I say “you are free now to say what you want.”

He is brave and sensitive, still worrying more about other people than himself. I have the most trouble when it comes to recognizing how much I will miss him, how much he meant to me,  and for so long.

He is so tired; he hurts so much, he is ready to go. I was taught never to urge the dying to hang on or tell them they are tough and can handle it. I was taught never to say it will be okay; things will sort themselves out.

I was taught to meet him where he was, wherever he was, his sickness is not about me.

What keeps going around and around in my mind is this idea of the new country.  This is the great spiritual idea of moving from one place to another. Of realizing I have to leave the old country behind, it no longer works for me. I think this is why the death around me right is affecting me so powerfully.

I felt great loneliness and a deep longing for love and human contact; I have to be careful and discerning. I am. I am not lonely any longer.

This change requires another death, one inside of me; moving into the new country requires the end of what had become so precious to me: success, money, even affection, and praise.

Pain is my great teacher; I grow out of pain and learn from it.

Life in the new country is demanding; it requires making me naked and vulnerable. Sometimes I feel afraid and ache for all I left behind, all I have lost as I become older. Sometimes I want to go back.

As my friends say goodby and move away, each one leaves me swimming in a clear blue sea of gratitude.  I can’t go back, because there is no longer anything left for me in the old country.

Each time, my idea of acceptance takes hold and becomes a part of me. Oh, I say, now I get it. That is as much a part of life as breathing.

I am drowning in riches in the new country. I have love, wonderful work; I have so much: my love, my blog, my pictures,  my farm, my dogs, my donkeys and sheep, the friends I’ve made, the photos I take.

The old country has lost its charm. I can’t go back.

The great challenge for me is faithfulness. The more deeply I love my spiritual life, the more quickly I will understand what it means to live with faith and what it means to be faithful.

So I have to go forward, a few steps at a time, slowly and carefully, opening myself up to trust, trusting that I will feel more comfortable each time I leave what is normal and go to the next place. I’ll be able to stay longer.

I will no longer need to go back and forth.

Pain is a great teacher, so is loss; I have to live through the pain slowly and thoughtfully and chip away at its great power over me.

What is our pain, yours and mine? I need to declare my vulnerability. The new country is not a place of death but a place of life. I give thanks to my life every day that I can breathe.

I want to call my friend now and talk about the New Country. He very much wants to hear about it.