Since we talked about grace two weeks ago, let’s look at another g-word: grief. As Merriam-Webster says, it’s a deep and poignant distress caused by bereavement. It can last for months or years, depending how you deal with it. Or it can be episodic, linked to key dates on the calendar.
Grief is not just about people and pets dying. It also hits us when we end a relationship, lose a career, or become ill enough that we can’t work. I had a double whammy of grief when I experienced the latter two. I’m not quite over it; it sits in the back of my mind and emerges when I’m really not feeling well.
Last Tuesday I called my mom because it would have been my dad’s 85th birthday. After I got off the phone, I started feeling weird. I was antsy and indecisive. I poked around on the web and wasted time. In the evening I couldn’t decide what to do, if I would read my book by the fire or if I would even have a fire at all. I felt like it didn’t really matter, that nothing was going well anyway. I finally settled down with my book by the fire, and managed to regain some equilibrium. But it wasn’t until the next day that I realized I’d been reacting to my dad’s absence with feelings I couldn’t interpret.
I’ll be the first to say I’m bad at emotions. I can’t identify them well, especially my own. I’m not good at emotional nuances: I can say I feel sad, but I don’t know how to dig deeper than that, to grief, abandonment, despair, and loneliness (I got those from the emotion wheel I looked up on the web). Even though I thought I had dealt with my dad’s death, it obviously still bothers me. And that’s okay – the key is to recognize it. That’s my stumbling block.
My friend Laura said that when it comes to her mother’s birthday, she’s out of sync for a week leading up to it. My sister had a friend who felt emotionally challenged the week before the anniversary of her husband’s passing. It’s a real thing, thought how I could have thought otherwise, I don’t know.
I don’t claim to be an expert on grief – I’ve only had one close family member pass away. For beautiful books on grief, read Kathryn Schulz’s Lost & Found, or Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, to name just a few.
What I am familiar with is losing dogs. Four of them so far.
We remember each of our dogs by celebrating with a glass of bubbly. Tsuga, our very first dog, had his birthday on 6 December. Just three days before my dad’s. We raised a glass to him and remembered all the ways in which he was unique. It would have been his 20th birthday, that’s how long ago we had him. He died early, at 7 years old, of lymphoma. Before Tsuga passed, Jasper, our first flat-coated retriever, died at 4 years old from a cancerous tumour. His birthday is the same as our anniversary in late September, which makes it a bittersweet day.
On the wall above my dresser is a photo collection Dave made me of our second and third flatcoats: Cosmo and Cedar. Cedar’s birthday is the 29th of December, and Cosmo’s on 22nd February. Every night, from bed, I look at that collage and miss them even more. They were peas in a pod, buddies in and out of the house. It doesn’t feel that long ago that they went over the rainbow bridge, though it’s been five years for Cosmo and three years for Cedar. They were both big personalities, and like all flatcoats liked to lick your face and generally be naughty.
Now we only have Silah, whose birthday is on March 22nd. She’s a long-haired German shepherd cross, and is much more reserved than the flatcoats were. She doesn’t play with toys unless they’re your gardening gloves. She doesn’t get overly excited, but when she does she howls, and you can hear her from outside.
She’s our oldest dog so far – Cosmo was 8 years old and Cedar made it to just over 10 years; Silah is now 10.5 years old. We’re looking forward to celebrating her birthday, like last year when Dave made her a pupcake iced with yoghourt and a small candle in the middle.
I wonder at the nature of grief. Can you collapse under the weight of it? My father and four dogs—is that a lot to grieve? It doesn’t seem like it when there are those who have many more people to grieve. Consider the Palestinians in Gaza. The Jews in WWII. The Ukrainians right now. The mothers in Argentina under Pinochet, whose babies were taken from them. So many lost in those conflicts.
How do you live through grief? When we lost Cedar, Silah went into a grieving period that lasted months. She was panting with anxiety all the time and looking around the house and in the yard to see where her playmate was. Of course, we grieved, too, not just because Cedar was gone but because we’d lost our last flatcoat: we didn’t have that silly energy in the house anymore.
The hardest thing about losing our dogs is that we’ve always had to make the decision to let them go. They haven’t gone quietly in their sleep. Imagine making that decision for a person. People have to do it all the time: honour their spouse or parents’ DNR requests by “pulling the plug,” as it were. Knowing how hard it is with dogs, I feel it must be many magnitudes more terrible to be responsible for a human life.
Some people discount grief over pets, but studies show that it can be harder than grieving a family member. Because we interact with our dogs all the time, the loss of their presence is keenly felt every day. They are woven into the fabric of our lives, and we skip a stitch every time we look for them on their mat or imagine we hear them drinking from their bowl.
I imagine it’s the same with losing a spouse. They’re also woven into the fabric of our everyday life, and their passing becomes a hole in the fabric of life that we can’t seem to bridge.
I didn’t see my dad every day. I saw him 2-3 times a year, when he and my mom came to the Island or when I went to Ottawa. The first time I went to Ottawa after he died I kept expecting him to come clomping down the stairs in his orthotic shoes and tell a complicated story, or read me something from his American Scientist magazine. It was strange to be in the house without him, and I couldn’t imagine what it must be like for my mom.
My psychiatrist said that he had a dog once, but never got another because losing him was so hard that he didn’t want to go through it again. I can understand this. We aren’t planning on getting a new dog after Silah goes, in part because we don’t want to have to say goodbye again. The grief is too hard to manage.
Grief is a slippery thing. It eludes Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief—you may skip a stage or jump around a bit between the stages. It is unique to everyone, depending on the strength of their relationship and the way in which their loved one has died.
Maybe the trick is to just sit with it. Hold its hand. Wait for it to be ready to go. While living our lives as best we can. We can’t avoid it—might as well embrace it.
