grief is a wild thing
and it's also quite rude
I have admittedly been a bit lax in writing one of these posts. But all of our inboxes are full to overflowing, and time seems to move in such strange waves that last month feels both like yesterday and 10 years ago.
Two weeks ago, I was sitting with my dog on what I knew was her last day, with the vet scheduled to come the next morning. My dog and I were lucky enough to have almost 2 decades of adventures together - and we had some pretty amazing ones. She traveled with me all around North America, on trains and planes and buses and boats, hitchhiking in pick up trucks and much snazzier rides - we did everything together, and we did a lot.
I knew she was getting ready to go; for about a year I’d been consciously preparing. I thought I was ready. But I don’t know if one can ever really be “ready” for the loss of someone who feels like an extension of oneself (and I say someone because she really was such a person of a dog).
She was my second heart, and these last two weeks without her have been a wild ride into grief, in all its rudeness.
I have been so lucky to be held by so many as I’ve been here. Lody (Lody the Lodestar is one of her many official titles) was loved by many, and so I haven’t had to grieve alone. Thank goodness. Grief is not something we should do alone.
Two weeks ago I was sitting with Lody in those last days as I made the strange decision to set a time for the vet to come. I say it was strange because it is - it is very strange to realize that a relationship I had anchored my life around for so many years was now scheduled to end, at 9am on a Tuesday. My friend and fellow writer Kate Senecal sent me a message (and it is very good to be friends with writers, as they do send very good messages) that Grief is a Wild Thing. And it felt so true, and so helpful, that as I was sitting on the couch watching Lody sleep, I quite literally made it first into a meme, and then into a teeshirt. I’m wearing it now, as I write this.
Grief is a wild thing. It’s rude, and uncivilized. It doesn’t fit well into polite society; it’s muddy and wretched. Small talk takes up too much space in these wild lands of grief; being asked how I am is too big of a question.
I have the good fortune of grieving a dog who had the fullest, and most fun life. I have photos of her leaping off of rocks into rivers, leaping in the waves in the ocean, lying in the sun and playing (always playing) on so many beaches, looking out over the Grand Canyon, and wandering through several different rain forests. She had more adventures than most could ever dream of, and then when her body became too old for adventuring, she had a lovely retirement of chasing sun puddles on the floor and a nightly ritual of a raw chicken wing for dinner. Her death was gentle, and her life was well-lived and so very well-loved. This is not a tragedy.
But grief is a wild thing. It’s rude and uncivilized, and while I am so grateful that her loss wasn’t tragic it doesn’t mean her loss is easy, not for me.
I do know that while grief is wild and uncivilized, it wants to be shared. And I know we’re all grieving, someone or something. I am a private person, even if the nature of my work means I have to talk about myself publicly rather often, and there are aspects to this grief that even my most cherished friends haven’t seen - grief is, at times, especially at its most raw, very private. But the whole of grief, and what it means to grieve, is a necessary thread that weaves us into community together. I am so grateful for the ways I have been held in my grief over Lody’s departure, a grief that is of course tied into every other grief I’ve ever felt. I am grateful for the ways I am learning to be held, and learning how to hold others in their own grieving, through what this grief is teaching me.
I don’t have a pithy way to end this note. I will say this: Lody passed just before the autumn equinox, and with each season, I name a new focus for our work in Anchor, the somatic learning community I have been facilitating for almost 5 years now. I knew I didn’t want to hold our focus onto grief and grieving for a full season, that felt like too much to hold, and also like too much of a focus on just one flavor of our complex human experience. So I chose instead to name our focus as one of space.
The space to let the grief in, instead of letting it go. The space to hold the emotions we have often been taught to push away, and to hold them as sacred and precious, to make careful space in our own cellular matrix for the grief as well as the joy. We’re only 2 weeks into our weekly practices with this as our focus, and it’s been profound. So if I can wish you anything, I wish you the space to feel what you are feeling, as you are feeling it, to give all of your most wild and rude emotions space to live within you.
