Our world lost a little light this week. Wren’s little buddy up the road was run over and killed. He had just celebrated his two years old birthday. It was instantaneous. He chased a car out the driveway into the county road and a tanker truck took him out, probably without even knowing it. His person had chased after him and found him. Barely a minute had elapsed. As she stood in shock, a cowboy stopped to offer help. She called a couple of friends, one of whom notified me; the other, whose car he had chased, returned with a third friend and began to dig a grave.
We met him shortly after he came to live on the mesa, when he was not quite three months old (see Puppies). Most of my pictures of him then, and later whenever he came to visit, are blurry because he was always in motion when I saw him. He loved to run, to hunt, to chase, and in true terrier fashion once he set his mind on something he did not willingly stop.
I’ve loved dogs who have died in far worse ways, long slow agonizing deaths, from stomach cancer, or drinking anti-freeze, or even being struck by a truck and lingering long enough for their people to watch them suffer, unable to help. Oso’s untimely death, like any death that touches us personally, that wracks our own little world, is a poignant reminder that anything can happen at any time, that we’re given this one precious day as a gift each time we wake up alive. We don’t know if we will even have tomorrow, or if life will be the same for us tomorrow as it was today.
I had been making chicken broth when I got the text “Our sweet Oso is in doggie heaven…” I was ladling the broth into pint jars, and knew in my bones the right next thing to do was to drive up with a jar of nourishing broth, knowing she wouldn’t have had anything to drink or eat and may not remember to do either for hours. When I arrived they were putting the last rocks over the small grave under a juniper in the center of the driveway circle. After subdued and tender greetings, I handed off the broth and helped gather tools. Another friend arrived as I was leaving. Altogether five women showed up for our friend in her literal hour of grief.
In the slow, mile drive home I felt the weight of the change in her world, the brutal empathy of knowing how I would feel going to bed suddenly bereft of Wren, waking the next morning without her. As I rounded the last corner it hit me how truly terrible I would feel if it had been Oso’s person instead, or any of us five friends who came to offer comfort: It could have been any one of us, on foot, or bike, or in our little metal bucket on wheels, getting smashed by an industrial truck. Or a train. And from there it was a small step to recall the suffering and grief that rocks millions of lives daily when a beloved dies, a pet, a child, a spouse, a parent, a friend, from illness or in unexpected ways, in wars, in famines, in all the ways. A sudden ache for everyone I love, a pre-grief, blossomed in my breast.
We each respond to grief in our own unique way. I know more than one grown man who has sobbed at the loss of a dog and never shed a tear for a person’s death. I tend to get very quiet for a long time; some might call it shutting down. Oso’s person has been grieving with courage, grace and equanimity, holding the horror of what happened, the self-wounding if only‘s, the surrender of inevitable acceptance. She is grateful that it was mercifully instantaneous; he never saw it coming. She was helpless to stop it. And the cowboy was a gift from god there in her moment of need. It was a horrible accident, the kind of thing that just happens (all the time), nobody’s fault but simply a result of conditions beyond anyone’s control: cause and effect. Even in her grief she is able to express gratefulness for the mutual love in their short companionship together.
Monday evening a junco smacked into the living room window and broke its neck. Grief took center stage early this week, in the smallest of deaths. And then there was Oso. And just this afternoon, after this blog was largely written, I learned of the sudden, surprising death of a pillar of the community. I barely knew her, but another dear friend was shocked to find her dead on the floor of her garage after she failed to show up at an event. She was a mother, a grandmother, a vibrant healthy elder, and now just like that she is not. Her family, her friends, rocked and grieving. It happens every day somewhere, 150,000 times: a person dies.
A shattering twinge of knowing my own death takes my breath away sometimes. This is why we can’t remember it constantly. It’s just too shocking to contemplate our own death, or the fundamental truth that everyone we love will eventually be lost to us. And yet we must, at some point, consider it deeply. Any hospice worker will tell you that many people are filled with regret when they come to the end of their life without having done so. When we think about death (our own and others’) ahead of time we grow in wisdom and compassion. Awareness is a breath away. Death is certain, time of death uncertain. One thing we can know is that life will change after the death of a beloved, but we can’t know in what way: what further sorrows or antidotal joys will arise moment to moment. To live fully is to be present with whatever is, in each moment. Like gratitude, grief changes everything, for awhile.
