Life and Death and the Edge Between

January 18, 2020

This morning began rather bizarrely, unless you own hunting dogs and live wrapped in Vermont fir forests like I do. Before even sipping my first coffee, my dog Charlie, a Springer Spaniel, gave me a freshly killed squirrel. He didn't want to give it up and he was proud of himself, but a bowl of dogfood beckoned him and he was a good boy. I, having gotten similar gifts throughout my lifetime from both dogs and cats, knew better than to lose my composure and instead thanked him, exchanging the squirrel for a special treat. Though grateful I was not. I would like to say that I got out a shovel and buried the poor thing, but no, I did not. There's a good foot of snow or more so instead I tossed it deeply into the woods where I can see recent prints from the fisher (cat). Perhaps providing a meal for a hungry predator. I did apologize to the poor squirrel, a male, said a prayer, and wondered if that would keep all the other squirrels away from the bird feeders this week or not.

DNA

This post isn't about the squirrel or my dog though. It's more about life and death and the edge between. 

Billy

After a month of trying to come to terms with and find answers, my daughter's cat Billy, died of cancer late last night. I learned this after I drank that first coffee. After I dealt with the squirrel. It's the first pet she has lost as an adult. My daughter is very kind to all creatures. As a child she would "rescue" the ants one by one in the house, and all the worms that would come out onto the driveway after a rain. One of Jim's hospice nurses did the same and so I knew we were in good hands. I recall when I was the age Tegan is now, telling her that it was ok to dig in a garden as any worm cut in half, simply created two worms. A sort of miracle of life in itself. Today she is heart wrenchingly broken as is my heart for her. If you want to break a mother's heart, break that of her child. I know her grief and all the emotions grief can provoke so instead of saying things that I might later regret, I hold my thoughts and instead listen (often hard for a mom who wants to fix everything), cushioning her pain. Tucking her heart in mine for safe keeping.

Tegan and Buster, a very longtime ago

And yet sorrow's edge today cuts even deeper. It's Jim's seventy second birthday. I've been anticipating and prepping myself to navigate today but instead I'm left without that plan. How do all these things line up like this? Life.

Tegan and Jim, many, many moons ago

Since Jim's dying, our once highly celebrated months—Halloween to Valentine's, have been rough for me to walk through alone. They cover favorite holidays, when we first "saw" each other, our first date, when he asked me to marry him, and sadder events, like his cancer diagnosis and entry into hospice. For the last month or two, it has hit me that I am now older by a few months than he ever lived to. Simply hard to imagine as he lived life with such vibrancy. There's some sort of underscoring of grief in that for me. He was always older, wiser, my safe space, my person who I was soft with. Like any married couple, we had hoped to live together until we were in our eighties or nineties. And that first year after he died, during the Covid lockdown, I myself struggled to find the will to live without him. There was so much to grieve. Jim's death marked the first time in my entire life that I lived alone. There was so much to physically repair beyond even my heart. And my roles as lover, wife, caretaker, even professor all changed instantly. Yet, as my friend Verandah Porsche, herself a widow, wrote to me then "it will soften". 

Jim

My grief has softened. In many ways it is purer now. No longer about losing who I was then or losing the life we lived, and the life we planned for. It's no longer about facing obstacles alone that presented themselves then. It's purely about my love of Jim and missing so very much him. This holiday season is one that I no longer struggled to walk through, instead I have found my pace. I think Jim would be so proud of what I've accomplished and how I've changed, how I continue to be curious, to grow, and to love. I have softened back into loving life, finding purpose, and I've found a new beauty in life. Ironically the beauty is found in those spaces both hard and soft, between living and dying. The preciousness of a cat's purr, one's last breath, just breathing, the hunting dog's delight in bringing its owner prey, feeding a hundred or more chick-a-dees, nuthatches, and other forest birds in the coldest season, the bliss of a downhill that is icy, supporting those at the hardest parts of their lives, and recognizing that a grieving heart is perhaps the most beautiful, selfless expression of a person's soul.