I believe that all great spirituality is about pain and fear, and if we do not transform or confront our pain (or write about), it will either  devour us, or we  will transmit it to those around us, most often the ones we love the most.

I’ve  had a number experiences in my life which caused me to think and  write about death, and I’m grateful for all of them.

One was my hospice therapy work with Izzy and Red (Izzy & Lenore). Another was the death of beloved dogs, which inspired me to write a book about grief (Going Home).

Another was my work at the Mansion Assisted Care Facility, where a number of residents I became close to have died, and the latest is the experience of my good friend Ed Gulley, the dairy farmer, who has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

Death has become a private, most often, invisible, experience in America. As a writer, I feel obliged to acknowledge that death is a universal experience. Everyone reading this has lost something dear to them, or will.

There is no grief I could experience that has not been felt by countless others, including almost every one of my readers, at any age. It is never unique to me. The moment I forget that, my writing becomes useless, and i drift towards narcissism.

The new and deepening reality is that people die in hospitals and nursing homes now, rarely in their own  homes.

We very rarely see them die.  Health care can be miraculous, but it is often cruel and expensive and impersonal when it comes to dying. We can keep people alive for a long time, but no one wants to be responsible fo how they live.

The media is obsessed with violence in America, but shuns death. The lives of the aged, sick and dying are now controlled by doctors and insurance companies and the vast and impersonal and costly health care system. The word that describes this system for me is de-humanizing.

I know that there are what the nurses and doctors call “good” deaths and “bad” deaths. The good deaths I have seen take planning, courage, support and foresight.

My friend Ed Gulley is writing his own radical chapter about death, he has chosen to die openly and quite publicly, and if he can help it, at home.

He has decided not to be hidden away or made invisible, he will not go quietly into the night.

Ed has refused medical treatment for his brain tumors – a wise decision, according to every doctor or nurse that I know – and is writing about his illness or posting videos about it on his blog, the Bejosh Farm Journal.

He recently posted on Blog Entry No. 20 a video message aimed exclusively at his fellow farmers moving into Spring “rush-rush” mode. In the video Ed warns farmers to take at least five minutes a day to sit in the sun and look up at the sky and cherish life, “before you end up like I am.”

When I went to see him (above) Friday, he was as good as his word, sitting out in the sun with his dog, looking up at the sky.

One thing I have learned about grieving and death is that everyone has the right to approach  it in their own way, despite the many doctors and  zealots and politicians trying to tell us how we must die.

I love  Ed, but of course, we do not always see the world in the same way, that is part of the beauty of our friendship. Ed writes from the heart, his blogs are a diary of perpetual feeling. Not surprisingly, he is turning to poetry, he says it helps him focus his ideas.

Ed has also cautioned me, among others,  to take it easier, and “sniff the roses.” As he reviews his life, he is re-considering how hard he worked, and  what he neglected to do.

I don’t see relaxing as something I need to do or wish to do. Perhaps I am blind and in denial – I am not really able to stand in his shoes – but I see death now as a part of life, the  real issue for me about death making time and  thinking ahead to plan for the death I want. But it is still an idea for me, it is not yet upon me.

Since death is a taboo in our society, hardly anyone stops to plan for it.  I’d rather go to a movie. I’ve seen so many people who regret not planning when they could.

In modern America, there are few simple or easy deaths. Researchers say that people who turn their dying over to the health care system take an average of six years to die, and it is almost never painless or quick.

The “good” deaths I have seen come from people who think and talk about dying, write their wishes down, talk to lawyers and loved ones about preparing legal documents and who don’t wait for emergencies.

I admit to being taken aback by Ed’s message to the farmers, and I will tell him so.

He seemed to be blaming the good and hard work he did all of his life for his cancer, and that seemed a harsh message to me.  I can’t speak for  him, but to me, cancer is not a punishment for the hard life of the farmer. Ed is a good man who worked hard for his family every day. And he loved and loves his life.

I had to smile a bit when I saw this video, I pictured all of the farmers listening.

I’ve never met a farmer – including Ed – who has five or ten minutes to spend sitting out in the sun with his dog, I’ve never met a farmer who has come close to doing all of the things he or she needs to do in the course of a day. The life they choose is rich, but full of hard and relentless and mostly unappreciated work.

I know how hard it is to salute the sun when there is a lot of bill-paying work to do. I never could do it.

(I actually have evolved, I spend roughly an hour a day in rest, solitude, contemplation and mediation, more time resting than Ed or any other dairy farmer would spend in a year.

(Writers do not have replacement knees and hips, as a rule, they more frequently have sore butts from sitting. Most of the farmers I know are not bionic men.)

As people approach death, they quite often ask “why?” To me, that is like asking why the sun comes up.

It just does, and we just will. We have nothing to say about it.

I am nonplussed by people who tell me they loved their dead dogs so much they will never get another one. What did they think would happen? And what to we think will happen to us? And do they know that every dog over on the earth has lost a dog?

Ed is not, in my mind, responsible for his cancer, or his  perhaps inevitable  death. We will all die, of course, and so will everyone we know and love. Acceptance of our deaths is one our most difficult spiritual struggles. Ed writes that he is not fighting the reality of it.

The great spiritual thinkers all teach about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. At that place, wrote Richard Rohr, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect.

It’s called freedom, and I believe Ed is close to finding it.

Social media has changed the way we die in America, it has broken the old media taboo  about death, and also become a focal point for grieving.

I see people mourning dogs for years after their deaths, and I see people sharing the loss of loved ones almost automatically and drawing upon the sympathy of others. Grieving is not, for many, so lonely an experience as it once was.

A  few years ago, it was unthinkable for a many like Ed to share his death in so personal and intimate a way, Even now, it is rare.

But this idea also has its  traps and pitfalls, Ed gets messages every day from people all over the world urging him to share every detail of his new journey as often as he can. He is grateful for these messages, and encourages them. They help him.

Ed’s blog posts are a hit online. But I  get uneasy about these requests. Ed has the sacred right to say anything he wants about his brain cancer, but I do not have the right to tell him to do it, or plead with him to do it, or even encourage him to do it.

I told him I hope he never feels he is obliged to do it.

This is his choice, every single day, not mine. Social media is a boundary killer, and nobody’s life is a soap opera to be scheduled daily for the amusement or enlightenment of others. He should never feel or be pressured to write a single word about his brain cancer.

Like Ed, I share my life openly, which makes some people uncomfortable. I also keep much of it private.

I see that his blog  sometimes make me uncomfortable, that is inevitable and appropriate to me.  Good writers always made people uncomfortable, so do truth tellers. Ed is, after all, challenging us to look at  death in a close but different way.

Cancer and death should not be comfortable to read about, like a mystery novel is. It is our discomfort which draws us and perhaps gives us the gift of understanding. Heartbreak and disappointment are stepping stones to enlightenment.  Falling down is the only way to understand getting up.

I don’t know if I could share the process  of dying as openly as Ed is.

But I admire his courage and honesty and openness, and also, his pioneering use of technology to explore death. Ed has rejected the idea of death as a secret, he has refused to disappear, his wish is to share the experience openly and honestly in the hope that others will benefit from it.

I already have.