ARCHIE & TEDDY

HOW THE GROWL OF GRIEF IS NEVER SILENCED

(Above: Teddy and Archie sunning in our garden atop Telegraph Hill on Lombard Street when we lived in San Francisco.)

I have always kept a line of social media demarcation between what I write in my posts on Instagram and Facebook and what I write here at SES/SUMS IT UP. But I am making an exception today because I want this to be in my archives here. Plus, I’m not sure how much of an overlap finally there is between the two types of readership. I hope if you’ve read these two posts from the past two days on Facebook, you’ll forgive me for repeating them here today - which is itself appropriate since so much of them is about forgiveness.

These two posts are about my dogs Archie and Teddy. They were in my life for around 15 years in all, Archie having died first and then Teddy three years later. I miss them every day. I still dream about them. But dog love teaches us two things - not only how to love unconditionally and commit to that love and the care it takes to have it in your life, but it also teaches us about loss. So much about loving a dog is about losing the dog, the loss is love’s leash.

I did want to give you a bit of something extra in the column, so here is a poem I found today about loss. It is by Wesley McNair. A native of New Hampshire, he is now professor emeritus and writer in residence at the University of Maine in Farmington. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also been awarded the Robert Frost Prize, and the Theodore Roethke Prize. In a review of McNair’s 2006 collection, The Ghost of You and Me, fellow poet Philip Levine admired his “many skewed and irresistible characters who manage to get into odd situations for which there is only one remedy: to persevere. ... he strikes me as one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.”

LOSS

by Wesley McNair

It must be difficult for God, listening

to our voices come up through his floor

of cloud to tell Him what’s been taken away:

Lord, I’ve lost my dog, my period, my hair,

all my money. What can He say, given

we’re so incomplete we can’t stop being

surprised by our condition, while He

is completeness itself? Or is God more

like us, made in His image—shaking His head

because He can’t be expected to keep track

of which voice goes with what name and address,

He being just one God. Either way, we seem

to be left here to discover our losses, everything

from car keys to larger items we can’t search

our pockets for, destined to face them

on our own. Even though the dentist gives us

music to listen to and the assistant looks down

with her lovely smile, it’s still our tooth

he yanks out, leaving a soft spot we ponder

with our tongue for days. Left to ourselves,

we always go over and over what’s missing—

tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses

as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop

reaching for on the other side of his bed a year

later. Then one odd afternoon, watching something

as common as the way light from the window

lingers over a vase on the table, or how the leaves

on his backyard tree change colors all at once

in a quick wind, he begins to feel a lightness,

as if all his loss has led to finding just this.

Only God knows where the feeling came from,

or maybe God’s not some knower off on a cloud,

but there in the eye, which tears up now

at the strangest moments, over the smallest things.

(Above: Archie in his shroud the day he died in my arms in San Francisco, California.)

ARCHIE

It was Archie who, after a couple of years of just the two of us, herded me toward adopting Teddy as his brother, and thus herded the three of us into a family. One of the things I am most grateful for in my life is that Archie who witnessed so much of my active addiction herded me as well toward recovery and for the last five years of his life never saw me use. He died in my sober arms. Teddy didn't. Teddy saw me use again but never stopped loving me, nor I him. That is one of my biggest regrets, however, and each day in my prayers when I mention Archie and Teddy, I ask for Ted's forgiveness for my using again at times in front of him. I am not sure I'll ever forgive myself for it. But each new day I hope Teddy does.

Yesterday I posted a photo of Teddy in his shroud after his death. This is Archie in his at our place atop Telegraph Hill in San Francisco where he died. San Francisco will always be the place where Archie died - and a part of me along with him.

Archie and Teddy are embedded within me; they are still the best part of me. I sometimes long for our life together but in some way I know they not only herded us all toward each other and me toward recovery but now in their absent presence herd me each day on this pilgrimage I am on. Their paws are marking the path I follow.

Yesterday, my friend Ed Gavagan in his moving, deeply sweet and wise and heartbreakingly eloquent eulogy for his wife Sekeena at her funeral, which I watched on its live stream from a Unitarian church in Manhattan, spoke of their path once she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She asked him what was the path forward for them and he told her that there was none, that they would make the path by walking it and then leave that path behind for others to find because they had made it. My loss of two dogs is nothing like the loss of a man for his wife and the mother of his child even though Archie died of multiple cancers and Teddy of kidney failure and I did witness their slow deaths and cared for them in bodily ways as well as spiritual and emotional ones. Nothing alike and yet so much the same.

All specific grief in our lives, I think, serves as a catalyst to feel a deeper grief we all carry within us as humans, lances it, and deepens somehow the love we continue to feel for those no longer here no matter the kind of bodies the sentient beings had while here as they guided us toward our better selves.

Seeing my friend Eddie grieving so yesterday filled me with all the griefs I've felt in my own life which now includes that which I felt for him yesterday and even his own in some way. Grief is a mixture of it all - life and love and friendship and absence and presence and letting go and holding on and all the unseen hovering that seeps into us and becomes a part of our very breath. Grief is not just manifested in tears but becomes a part of the way we breathe. It informs our life and how it does so can make us better or make us bitter. Death breath better bitter. Everything connects and is so close to being what it is not. I was weaned on grief with the consecutive deaths of my parents when I was child. I like to say it was the third nipple I nuzzled. It has been my nourishment my whole life.

Grief is the root around which I have grown.

It grounds me.

It is my sky.

But it is not the Light.

That is what Light is: not grief.

(Above: Teddy in his shroud the day he died in my arms in Hudson, New York.)

TEDDY

A day ago I was looking for another photo on my old Facebook feeds when this one unexpectedly for some reason popped up. At first I just saw my old living room space in my old loft in Hudson and longed momentarily for my old life for which possessions meant so much to me. I do miss my art and my midcentury furniture - I will confess that. But most of all I miss my aesthetic and walking back into its embrace knowing that that was my home: placement and art and the choices of objects I had made and how I lived spatially. Now the placement and spatial aspect is how I have placed myself spatially within the wider world. My lived-in-the-moment life is my newer aesthetic - spareness is my new spatiality.

Then I looked more closely at the photo and I realized I was also looking at the shroud of Teddy on the morning he died in my arms at sunrise. I wrapped him in a pillowcase and waited for friend to come over to take him to the vet to be cremated because I was unable to do it myself I was so bereft. There is the starkness of a deeper loss in this photo than just the loss of art and furniture. I think I will live with the aesthetic of loss all my life. All mornings are mournings for me in some deep and abiding way.

I miss Teddy so much. I dream of him often. I had been talking about him on Sunday with a friend at lunch - and how I carry his sweater with me around the world as a talisman that tells me that love is possible and I am less damaged than I thought I was because I loved Teddy - and his brother Archie - in the way I loved them. I could not have set out on this life I am living if Teddy and Archie were still alive. And yet I did re-home Finn and Matty, my cats, because I knew they would be okay without me and maybe even better off. I would not have set out on this pilgrims's life however if they had not found a home together. I was determined not to separate them. I had finally to look at my role in their life as the conduit to bring them together and I was the way station on their way to a better home just as Hudson itself - and a loft full of loved objects - was one for me toward my better one. I was their Hudson.

As for living each day with loss - each morning being a mourning - I think I am learning anew about that in my in-the-moment life for each lived moment is then lost because one is living the next one. I shed my life of owning so I could own this: loss is not sorrow but living because I lose each moment on my way to living in the next one. There is a steady stillness in that ever onward present moment. I have come to believe in simultaneous time and not the concept of its being linear. Indeed, reality is just the concept needed to rationalize the realm where humans hover. And if we are lucky other sentient creature-like beings hover alongside us - humans, dogs, cats, our other selves - as we artfully navigate our spatial aspects in this realm we call the world, a whirl of hope and grief and shedding and love and looking and longing and for but a moment (which is all the moments) taking one lifetime breath before another realm is breached and we learn that breathing is overrated and we become the emotion that others feel. We are the moment in which others live.

Onward …

(Above: Archie and Teddy and I when we all lived in San Francisco atop Telegraph Hill and would head up into Pioneer Park for a daily stroll. From a park for pioneers to this path I now walk for pilgrims, I am still at their side in some way and they by mine.)