Yes, I know, it’s a bit gloomy around here. First a post on childlessness, now grief. Well, it’s the time of year. We’re still in the Samhain window, the period in which we have honored the spirits of the dead for millenia. By early November in the Northern Hemisphere, our world is dying, changing, darkening. We feel the pull inwards as the leaves fall off the trees, and we begin to tread the path into our inner darkness as the nights draw in. A psychological shift towards thoughts of loss and death occur, just as it did for the ancients who named these days Samhain (Celtic for Summer’s End). Around the world, we honor the spirits of the dead.
In Mexico, the Day of the Dead merges the old Aztec festival with the Catholic All Saint’s Day, and the following day, All Soul’s. In old Britain, the season of All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day was called Allhallowstide, hallow being an ancient version of the word holy, and from whence we get the name, Hallowe’en. Remembrance Day/Veterans Day (November 11) honors those who have died in all the wars since World War One, which ended on that date.
While enduring and commemorating are very important and do much to assuage our personal and collective loss, there is another, inner dimension to grief. We get hints from the wisdom of the ancient Chinese, who associated the autumn with the emotion of grief, the element of metal, and the meridians of the lungs, large intestine and skin: the organs of release and the rulers of tears, spiritual connection, and deep thought.
My first initiation into the realm of grief came in my late twenties. My marriage broke up, killed by the struggles of adult life and two colliding agendas. This grief came on top of my grief at not having had children, of a medically botched aftermath to a miscarriage and a subsequent inability to conceive. And all this grief was intensified when our two dogs died, one at the beginning of the unraveling, and one at the end. I used to sit at the kitchen table, immobilized, staring out the window at the naked, leafless trees, the exhausted, straggly garden, the dull, leaden sky. I felt like them. They were me. The bare lostness of late autumn personified exactly my inner state. What I had lost could never come back. It was forever. And even my memories were tainted by what might have been, by what was so deeply unfulfilled.
It took me eighteen months to come back, to breathe air not filled with sadness every other breath. It was like coming up out of a very long dive to the bottom of the ocean. One day, sitting at the same kitchen table, I had an image of my psyche, the first time I had had such a thing since childhood, when I used to regularly imagine my mind in shapes and colors. My inner being now had layers that looked like the layers of precious ores inside the earth. They had been laid down by the grief, and I understood then that grief is important; it makes us deeper, richer, more interesting, more aware. If we don’t get completely stuck underground, underwater: if, whenever we can, we come up and breathe fresh air, walk outside and look around, continue making the contract with life that keeps us open to renewal of circumstance and refreshment of the spirit.
There have been other griefs since, one so traumatic that I still, seventeen years later, cannot write about it. And that silence too should be honored. My understanding of how grief influences us has not changed much, but my understanding of how to live through it has developed over time. Right now, I am putting into practice what life has taught me so far. Living through grief as best I know. It’s now one of the hardest stages, several weeks after the loss — six, to be exact — the dull days of getting used to the absence of a loved one.
This time: my friend the dog, Balthazar. It is the season of grief, my dog is dead, and I can’t sleep. I wake in the early hours, missing his presence in the house, his spirit of enthusiasm, and his boisterous love for everyone and everything. When he first died, on October 2nd, suddenly and without warning, I was bereft as well as shocked. I cried for five days before I emerged out of the acute grief phase. I felt that I was sadness, that the me that could express anything else had been completely consumed. Grief was all there was. The relieving aspect of this was its purity. Nothing else was happening, or trying to happen. And unlike with the griefs of my younger life, I knew where I was. I knew the territory, I knew I should express the acute stage completely, because it was an opening of my heart, it was my honoring of his being. I knew it is much harder to grieve properly later.
There is still much to release, and I know there are still more tears. He was my companion during a vivid decade in which we lived in three countries and ten homes. He went into each of these adventures with an open, loving heart, full of an untrameled zest for new experience. On our last journey together, we stopped at a dolmen near Limoges, off the main road. He gambolled around this ancient structure, while I stretched and restored my tired body for the remainder of the drive. Two men arrived, to look at the dolmen and take photographs. Balthazar bounded up to them and made friends, and then sat right next to the one who was being photographed, looking straight at the camera. He made the most of every opportunity to connect and be a part of whatever was happening. He taught me a great deal.
When one has made the grief journey several times one comes to understand that while there are no short cuts, there are ways we can make it easier on ourselves. We learn that it will not last forever, even though some griefs take longer to soften their grip on our minds and hearts than we think they will. We learn that we can turn the equation of loss around, being grateful for all the time we did get to spend with someone. Making some kind of a ritual helps, and that’s why the communal festivities of early November exist. And of course we can also create rituals ourselves that are healing, performed either alone or with close friends or family. After Balthazar died I did a ritual in my back garden with one of my oldest friends, who knew him well. In the absence of his body, we buried his things, his toys and collar and brush, in a box, in a corner of the garden by an old tree stump. We planted foxgloves from her garden above, and told Balthazar stories. The atmosphere became very light, because like most dogs, he brought the essence of joy and play into everything he did.
In time, the tree stump will be home for a Buddha, and a candle on next year’s All Hallows. In time, my grief will soften. In time, I will remember only the joy and warmth of that great big cuddly crazy dog. In time, I will plant a tree to honor him.
