Grievings

This grief is different. It took me awhile to figure out why. It is my first encounter with a loved one’s physical suffering from a violent death. Consequently, the shape and path of this grief is profoundly different than those I have experienced before. The many other human and animal passings in my life have been either peaceful or sudden. I recognize that I have been privileged in this.

This weekend our dog Shiloh was hit by a car. I wasn’t there, but a witness contacted me and gave me all of the details, so that I now replay it in my head in a tortuous, guilt-ridden, vivid loop. She suffered in a great deal of pain for quite a while before passing. For any of you who are ready to dismiss this experience as lesser because it is “just a dog,” move on. This post is not for you, and you can go haunt someone else’s blog.

It is not the first death for which I have felt responsible. That, too, was a different kind of grief from the peaceful passings of relatives and dogs who had lived long, rich lives and for whom passing was a palliative against future suffering. Those griefs were purely about loss. About the hollowness of absence and the void of their shapes in my life. The pain was about finality and erasure, the unfairness that the world should no longer house those personalities, those bright souls. When Shiloh killed our chickens, however, I felt responsible because I hadn’t adequately reinforced their coop fencing. Protecting those lives was my responsibility, and I’d failed. Once they entered our family, I had a trust and a duty to keep them safe. I suspected the fence wouldn’t be enough, but week after week went by with no incident. It was fine until it wasn’t. These were also violent deaths. But it was over quickly. Shiloh was an efficient hunter. That grief was profoundly personal, one I had to own as cause. Because of me, lives had gone out of the world. Because of me, my daughters lost friends and also experienced loss and grief. It was a new paradigm of grieving to accept fault for death and find a way to still be okay with myself as a humane being. I continue to stumble through the paradox that we should have such responsibilities, but yet be so profoundly fallible, and that small moments of negligence can have such irreparable consequences. I can’t be perfect, so I have to live with the fact that I will cause harm.

My grief over Shiloh’s death, however, doesn’t fit with any of these others. It is also a separate class. Her life was also my responsibility. And more than her life, her well-being. I wasn’t responsible for her death or her suffering. That was a confluence of the impersonal forces of nature shifting the ground and misaligning the gate latch and two drivers who were either drunk, inattentive, or unlucky (neither who hit her stopped). But I have the knowledge of how violently she died and how intense was her pain. Someone I love experienced horrible agony in the process of her death. Her brief life was full, rich, and bountiful, as my life was because of her in it, but her last moments in it were excruciating and relief from that torture a long time in coming.

That I couldn’t be with her at the end is my guilt. I’d procrastinated on getting her a new name tag with our phone number after she lost hers. I couldn’t have changed the outcome, but I could have been with her and saved strangers from bearing that terrible responsibility of comforting her. That guilt feels familiar, but the pain of knowing she suffered is new. This grief is mixed with horror and something I can’t describe. It is more than the existential ache of her loss and absence and more than the moral despair of guilt and responsibility. It is visceral. This is an embodying grief. It is painful in a new way that can’t be rationalized or soothed away. I don’t know how to do this type of grief. I don’t know how to go through the process with this kind of pain.

Each day, I have to get used to the silence of mornings that should be ringing with her neighbor-aggravating howls, a yard full of birds and squirrels that she would have stalked away, a floor that isn’t carpeted in white fluff. I don’t get to see her joyful full-body waggle. Cork doesn’t get to wrastle with his best friend. I can’t sneak her bacon grease or shoo her away from the trash can. I can remember her in all these ways, but I can’t reconcile all of the brightness of what she brought to us with the image of her broken body and what she had to go through as she let go of that terribly bright life. I don’t think I can do acceptance on this one.

Mortality, finality, are tough enough to reconcile with, but we have our philosophies and religions. Reasons and stories and the comfort of memories. I don’t know of any philosophy or religion, science or fiction, yet, however, that has given us an adequate means of coming to terms with suffering. It is the true ineffable. It is the fuck-up-ery, the remainder, the unaccounted-for in this chaos machine that we can otherwise put our equations to and force into a semblance of sense. We have so many ways of trying to get our universe to work properly, of imposing order. You can sermonize all day about Job, but a pretty bandaid is still just a mask, and suffering is just what it is. It is meaninglessness pure and simple.

Consequently, this is a new type of grieving for me. A new experience of the nature of the fragility of mortality. It makes happiness both harder and more precious. It presents a new challenge against hardening internally, forming callouses. As a writer, I’m supposed to have a conclusion to put on this, a summary, a bow. So, as a writer, I’m going to fail you, the audience, because I don’t. I’ve been writing all morning to try to find one, but it would be a betrayal to tie up something which simply won’t, and shouldn’t, be easy. I am supposed to aim for something called closure, but I don’t believe in its possibility or desireability. I am the carrier of the lives who pass through mine and the record of what they wrote into the world with all its glory, mundanity, and pain, and I don’t believe in silencing that howl into the void.