Shall we talk of loss kindly and politely as though these things happen all the time, as often as tying shoes and drinking water? Shall we try to bring loss into form when it is the absence of form, the disappearance of form, replaced by a hollow that nonetheless has its own sound, a slack key guitar twang or tremolo of a loon or ache of a squeaking gate to a chamber next to your heart? We relearn the location of our heart with every loss, every major loss, the ones that rise above noise level, the ones that remain open and enhance the purple of hyacinth in May and sunsets in October.
Yes, let us talk of such losses politely and with poise.
My dog has had a sudden spike in the negative indicators of his chronic kidney disease. I measure the wobbles of today against yesterday. I entice him with salmon hidden under ground chicken thighs and rice. Just please eat. Please eat. He still prances when he walks. He will be with me as long as he is happy, and he is still happy, but how did that expectation go from years to months?
My friends’ friends are dropping like flies. Mostly people I do not know.
We are in a sieve. People slip through the holes, making room for the next ones. Gravity is persistent and greedy as it cleans the slate–pulling babies into the world, giving goodness ongoing chances, eliciting poetry, song, and dance. It pulls us from origin and returns us.
If there is a time to come to terms with the rounding of organic life from beginning to end, to make sense of it, to accept it, old age is our last chance.
Poise, hard learned over time, helps us not to panic, not to scream, not to complain, but to accept—helps us say “Well, that was a helluva thing, wasn’t it?” Helps us say, “Glad I was here.”
When we recognize there was no reason for us to exist at all, but that we were made nonetheless and allowed to flounder, squirm, love, breed, and give, and discover that whatever that didn’t need to make us did make us, and loves us in its own way, then we can hold the whole of being loved and feeling loved against the shortness of living, the violence, horrors, devastation, cruelty, losses.
When we can hold love and joy and surprise, and wonder and amazement against a sort of in-born rot of ignorance, greed, and arrogance, then we can feel our place as carriers of the immensity, then we know we have had our turn.
When we can say “I understand little but know I am in the presence of a nameless force that makes flowers and welcomes poetry,” we can yield. We can yield to continual loss that is, in fact, a filling of the story of our lives and a gaining of what it is like to live.
My dog is barking at a delivery man, not so loudly as before, not throwing himself against the door, but barking nonetheless—barking in the way I would have always preferred, though not at this cost.
He does not think of these things, but pushes himself against me and allows me to nuzzle my face in his fuzzy ears in ways that are new. He stares at me and yields.
We will do this beautifully, my Phoenix. I promise.