Tuesday

Today is 9 days since a final hug.  An interesting journey-certainly painful in ways I didn’t think about.  I have been reading lots of info about grief.  This is the only time you read about such things because we really run away from the topic as much as we can in our culture, until we are cornered by it.  In fact, yesterday I avoided writing on this blog in an effort to “be normal.”

Sure.  Let’s go with that.  Normal.

Normal grief.  RUN AWAY is what we are good at.  (Monty Python reference.)  I read something lovely that Mr.Rogers wrote in his wonderful children’s book “When a Pet Dies.”  (a must read.)

“In grieving, we try to fill the empty space that was created in us by the loss.”

This statement rings really true to me.  After sitting shiva in whatever sense we do-and we all do it, we have to-we are felled, we are stopped, we are absolutely made to pause in our everyday lives by the loss of a loved one, furry or not, if our love was large enough.  So after sitting shiva for the absolute least amount of time we can, as our culture demands, we bound up to “be normal again.”  I read that the generally used psychological guidelines today allow TWO WEEKS of grief before someone is considered abnormal.  If you are incredulous, the name of this psychiatric tome is “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Fifth Edition” or DSM-5 as it is known in the field.   According to this professional handbook, anything longer is grounds for diagnosis and likely, medication.  Our culture is denying the pain of loss.  (I got all this, by the way, from a copy of the magazine Psychology Today, August 2018, which I picked up when I traveled in July at an airport.  I usually try to get things to read that I would not normally see.  From Loss to Love by Steven C. Hayes, PhD. )  So, I guess I have 5 more days before I am officially a nut case.   As if I need a timeline to know that.

Here is the problem-we can’t fill that hole.  Impossible because there is not another like the loved one we lost.  Just doesn’t exist and never will.  There will never be another pup who will grin sidelong at me in mischief as my Sadie did/does- (I really want it to be true that she is running around with my other darlings in a place I can’t see yet.)  SO we have to find a way to come to grips that we lost something in this sphere that we will not again regain–and I for one am crappy at that concept.  Finality doesn’t work well for me.  I try to bang myself on the head with ultimates, precisely because I don’t believe in them, and I think that maybe by being violent with myself-and unfortunately, those around me also most likely-I can reach a sort of norm.  After 63 years, I don’t think it’s working.  No norm on the horizon yet.

I think if one has bounded up from sitting shiva too long, one must sit down again.  I fear doing this alone.  In an account I read about pet grieving, the husband was done before the wife and the wife had to stop talking about it with him and had to only talk within herself, because others around you, no matter how kind, tire of your grief and it is back to your own head–ugh, back to that again.  But actually, that is fair, because all of us have a rhythm that is different from each other and we have to allow for that with each other.  This is when I would take off with Sadie for a good walk in the past-the wonderful remedy for me when I felt a bit on my own, as everyone does on occasion.  What a great girl and I hope she knows today how wonderful she was/is to have at my side.  I worry that maybe I drove her crazy a little bit–and then I think that if she was here physically right now and I said that to her, she would just lick my face just once-that’s what she did, as if to say to me “it’s all OK.  don’t worry.  I got this.”  Economy of speech/lick.  What a girl.  Yeah, I think I’m going to need more than 5 days.