I was glad for my hospice experience today.  I have a good friend who is dying, and  who has grown weaker and more fatigued since I last saw him. On the book tour, I couldn’t visit him as much as I might have wished, but now I can see him more frequently, and many of the memories Izzy and I shared those few years are coming back to me.

It was good to see him.  He was sitting up on the sofa in his living room, and he looked frailer and paler than I can remember seeing him, but his eyes were bright and missing nothing. He is in hospice care now, and was glad to see me too. We held hands, we hugged, we talked. My friend is very articulate, very self-aware. He has been struggling with a chronic illness for several years and he believes there are only a few weeks, months at most, left. He has lived a full and very active and self-fulfilled life, and I have long admired him.

He is on medication for pain, and for anxiety. Sitting with him this afternoon, we talked about Thanksgiving, his last Thanksgiving, he said, and we each spoke of how we wished to share the holiday. My editor pointed out to me today that my next book, “Dancing Dogs,” a short story collection, is funny, offbeat, different, and this reminded me of how much grieving has been in my mind the last few years, from my hospice travels with Izzy “Izzy & Lenore,” to “Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die.” It will be nice to go on a book tour without talk of grieving and loss.

But grieving and loss will be on my mind the next few weeks, and I was recalling my hospice experience, and the rules I learned there.

– Don’t bring your stuff in there.

– Don’t make the sadness and loss your own. It is not about you.

– Listen Actively. Go where he is, not where you think he should be.

– Don’t try and cheer him up. Or suggest he will be better.  Or deny his reality, whatever it is.

– See what you can do to be helpful. Listen, listen, listen.

I was reminded today of how comfortable I am in the presence of people on the edge of life. I don’t know why, I can’t imagine why. Perhaps it is because people at this point in life, like my friend, have dropped pretense, posturing and equivocation. They are very real, very honest. With his permission, and I suppose with yours, I’d like to write a bit about this experience as it unfolds.

It is sad, but not only sad. We talked, we laughed, we connected. I left feeling good, because he was so glad to see me.  I started to feel sorry for myself, and stopped that. It is not, in fact, about me, and I will not go there.  It is for him to be sad or happy, not me. I am wondering if he might like the new Amazon Fire, or the new Barnes & Noble Nook, as he can’t read and might enjoy audio books or videos. I am eager to go back.  We are in the final stages, it seems, and he is aware of that, and open about it. This, he said, will be his last Thanksgiving, and he wishes to think long and hard about how he will spend it. He said he hopes I drop by. I will.

And I am thinking about my Thanksgiving, and how I can possibly give appropriate thanks to Maria, my daughter, the farm, the animals, my writing and photography, to the people who follow both. I am thinking of it as my First Thanksgiving in many ways, the first one in which we are really free to shape our own day. And our vows to answer the call to life, however long it lasts.