IN MEMORIAM: losing Henry

Last June, I welcomed an elderly fox terrier into my home to help out his owner, a lovely person who is struggling with serious illness. Henry quickly made himself at home in my house and my heart, as will not surprise those of you who met the goofy little guy. After two decades without a pet I had forgotten how lovely it can be to have a dog around. Henry was a lovely presence when I was at home, a lively companion on car trips to the post office and Humane Society Thrift Shop, and a sweet fellow to sleep with, despite his tendency to hog ninety percent of my bed and snore.


Henry was sixteen when I first met him; though he was extremely spry for his age I knew from the start that his "time" might not be far away. It came last Wednesday, when he went into heart failure and was put peacefully to sleep. My house and car seem painfully quiet without him, and the mere sight of his dog bed or water bowl can make me terribly sad. But even at my weepiest moments my strongest feeling is appreciation. My years of caregiving had tired me at the deepest level—left me wanting to be still and solitary and responsible for, and to, no one. Henry helped open my heart again. There wasn't a single day when the sight of him didn't make me smile, or when some odd little habit of his didn't make me laugh. He quite simply brought me joy, and that's one of the best compliments I can pay any thing or any being.

It's been said that the closest bonds are not always the longest; my time with Henry proved the truth of that adage. Maybe our time with dogs can't be counted in conventional human days, any more than their lifespans can. Maybe relationship of any kind must be judged by tenderness as well as length. No matter how you measure it, Henry and I had six great months. To misquote Hamlet: Farewell, sweet silly pup. May quires of angels sing thee to thy rest, and may heaven never run out of liverwurst.

JOANNA TROLLOPE ON LOVE AND LOSS

British writer Joanna Trollope writes family, love and change with warmth, delicacy, and a wise understanding of the complexities of modern lives. Two of Trollope's novels, Next of Kin and A Passionate Man, deal explicitly with themes of loss and grief. A Passionate Man, my favorite of the two, begins when its protagonist Archie Logan learns that his father, who for many years has been a widower, has begun a passionate relationship with a charming older woman. Archie is an adult with a busy, successful life, but his father's sudden transformation from parent and best friend to besotted man in love jolts him back into childlike feelings of loss, jealousy and doubt. As he struggles to accept this new perspective on his father, he begins to question himself, his marriage and career as well—questions that remain far from resolved when his father suddenly passes on. The lives and personalities in the story are rich and messy, just as in real life, and the ending is happy without being in any way glib, simplistic or pat. I suppose that's the thing that I liked best about the book: Trollope's ability to write about the way change is inevitable in human lives, as well as the way we all grieve, heal, and move on.

NO TRAIN TODAY

I remembered having this photo in my digital archives as I re-read Louise Glück's poem before writing my post on it Wednesday.

The image isn't related to the poem in any literal way, but it's one I like. I found it early in the days of my grieving, and it expressed exactly how I felt: stopped in my tracks, almost literally. The familiar grooves along which my life had run seemed to have disappeared, or at least become impassable; as for the engine, the energy that had always fueled me, it had just stopped cold. I'll stop beating the metaphor over the head now; you get the idea.

I'm glad to say that though it took a lot longer than I could have imagined, my life (and my capacity to live it with zest) are chugging along once more. Patience, as always, was the key...though as I have said before, it's not my best quality (or even my second best). It's hard to trust that curiosity, passion, and energy will come back when you can't see a glimpse of them no matter how hard you stare at the horizon. Yet eventually they do return—and suddenly you have a train expected, arriving, today, this very minute, now.

FATHER'S DAY: the shadows of loss

Today was Father's Day, which also means that it was the last day of the annual U.S. Open golf tournament. Watching the Open was a family tradition when my parents were alive; we all gathered for lunch or Sunday dinner, then watched the golf as the afternoon wore on. Dad loved the intricacy and unpredictability of the game, and I found enjoying it with him both fun and deeply relaxing. (Translated: I often dozed happily off.) Mom would come in and out, cheering on the family favorites and bringing snacks in her time-honored way. There was always good food to be had at their house—the same could not always be said at my single-woman's house across town—and her goodies became as much a part of our Father's Day tradition as the Open's deep roughs and punishing hole placements.

I watched a bit of the tournament this year. It was held at beautiful Pebble Beach and it was full of its usual twists and turns. But sports-watching isn't quite the same without Dad, just as antiquing has lost much of its charm for me now that Mom isn't there to share my outings. It's not that I never go antique shopping, or never enjoy some sporting event on TV, or never think I might enjoy them again. It's just that for me, it turns out that both things were pleasureable more as a way to spend time with the folks than as an activity in themselves.

I guess what I'm saying is really simple, in the end: when we lose the people we love most, we sometimes lose the pastimes we loved most, too. Could I get my joy those pastimes back? Probably. But without Mom and Dad, I just don't have the desire to. Easier and more rewarding to find new pursuits, ones that don't have the shadow of loss to dim their pleasure.

LITTLE, SIMPLE, WISE

In the period after I lost my parents, I found and bought some excellent books on bereavement and healing.

The problem, as I discovered, was that I couldn't focus enough to read any of them. Some of them sit on my bookshelf today, still unread. By the time I could muster enough attention to read them, I no longer urgently needed the comfort they had to give.

Much later, I came across a little book that seemed designed to accomodate that kind of difficulty. How to Survive the Loss of a Love, written by Melba Cosgrove, Harold Bloomfield, and Peter McWilliams and first published in 1976, calls itself "first aid for emotional hurt (and a little second aid too)."

Co-written by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a poet, it describes itself as "kindly" and "companionable," and those words are just right. Rather than lengthy prose, it offers a series of small lists, focused paragraphs, and the occasional brief poem. I can guess what you're thinking: poems? Okay, let's be honest: these are not Shakespeare's sonnets. But even as something of a poetry snob, I think they make a real contribution to the book, creating yet another easy way for readers to recognize how universal their painful feelings are. Another useful feature of How to Survive the Loss of a Love is a series of brief suggestions about tangible things to do as healing progresses. I tend to approach "to do" lists with skepticism even in subjects less challenging than grief, but these were perfectly composed--wise, gentle, and reassuring whether you do them or not.

My copy came from a thrift store, and it looks as worn and well-loved as an old teddy bear. Many of its pages are turned down at the top, mostly those relating to forgiveness and rebound relationships. As I flipped through it for the first time, I wondered what had happened to its previous owner. But I didn't wonder why they read it more than once. I read it more than once too, and I've given copies to friends experiencing difficult times, too.

KAY JAMISON'S JOURNEY THROUGH GRIEF

I first discovered doctor and author Kay Redfield Jamison when I read her first book, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. The memoir, told from the unique perspective of someone who both suffers from bipolar disorder and acts as a doctor treating those who suffer from it as well, impressed me deeply. Fiercely honest and fiercely intelligent, beautifully written and above all courageous, it is the kind of experience a good memoir should be, the kind that deepens our understanding of what it is to be human.

I just finished Nothing Was the Same, her latest book, and it has many of those same strengths. The story begins with the death of her husband, Richard Wyatt, before flashing back to their lives, their meeting, their courtship, and their marriage. They met in mid-life, and built the kind of marriage that can only come, perhaps, from that age. It is quirky and yet tender, romantic yet profoundly realistic as well. As I read, I felt the sadness of the passing of this exceptional man, yet I also felt buoyed by my meeting with him.

There were many passages in the book that I loved, but two stood out so much that I want to share them with you. The first comes from the beginning, and spoke to me in part because it uses the same metaphor, of grief as a landscape, that inspired my own Grief Country. Jamison writes:

Grief, given to all, is a generative and human thing. It provides a path, albeit a broken one, by which those who grieve can find their way. Still, it is grief’s fugitive nature that one does not know at the start that such a path exists. I knew madness well, but I understood little of grief, and I was not always certain which was grief and which was madness. Grief, as it transpires, has its own territory.

At the very close of the book, she observes:

It is in our nature to want to hold on to love; it is grief’s blessing that we come to know that there are limits to our ability to do so. To hold on to love, I had to find a way to capture and transform it. The only way I knew to do this was to write a book, this book, about Richard. It would be about love and what love had brought, about death and what death had taken. I would write that love continues, and grief teaches.

Thank you, Kay Jamison; you are truly not only a doctor but a healer--sometimes a different, and often a more profound, thing.

LETTING GO FOR THE GREATER GOOD

Like most people, I have found it hard to let go of my late parents' things. My head is absolutely certain that they would not for a minute want me to turn my home into a museum of their every possession (as well, for that matter, of my grandparents' things, which they inherited and passed down in their turn). But my heart doesn't buy it. No matter how trivial the item or how little my parents themselves cared about it, it just feel unloving to give it away.

Over time I have found three things that make this easier, though never easy. The first is practice. The second a digital photograph, a strategy I'll write about in another post. The third is a strategy I've come to think of as "letting go for the greater good"--an overly grandiose name, really, but the best I can do.

Letting go for the greater good just means finding a way to honor some possession, and with it my parents' legacies, more in the giving-away of it than in the holding on. When I make the gift, its purpose, and its effect significant somehow, I feel not just comfortable but even good about letting the object go.

My siblings and I did this with the furniture none of us could fit from my parents' home. We gave those extra pieces, many of which were lovely and all of which were practical, to a young woman who had been living in the SafeSpace shelter and was now moving hereslf and her two kids to a new apartment. There could be no doubt, seeing the joy in her face, that giving these things away was much more meaningful than stuffing them somewhere in our own houses. Indeed, I could feel my mother's joy that the table, for example, that she had served so many loving family meals on would now be helping to make such gatherings possible for another mom who had been left with virtually nothing.

My dad's golf clubs were another sticking point. He dearly loved the game, and his bag and all of its accoutrements were just about impossible for me to let go. Until, at least, a friend had his own clubs stolen recently, right in the midst of a year of other financial challenges. How lovely it felt to give him Dad's gear and with it, a temporary substitute he could use until he had the time or money to replace the stolen clubs. I know Dad would approve. My friend promised to donate any clubs he didn't keep to First Tee, and I promised him that none of Dad's eternal putting "yips" were being passed on with his putter.

I guess all I'm saying, at rather great length, is that it's helpful to remember that hanging onto something may not turn out to be the best way we can honor a loved one's memory. Honoring their spirit, their values, their joys is so much more important than keeping a dining-room chair or a nine-iron. At least, that's the way I'd like to be remembered, and I think my parents would agree.