slow and low, that is the tempo

Maybe you're like me, but it takes slowing way down, doing just one thing at a time, for me to realize how much I am constantly rushing. Constantly.

But maybe you're not doing that. Maybe you're not holding your breath most of the time, blasting from one thing to the next, Chief Getting Shit Done Officer of your own life.  Maybe you're in this great state all the time, this state of calm inside a quiet moment.

Well, good for you.

Me, I have a serious problem with rushing.

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system reboot

Man oh man, the last few months have just been such a bitch.  I know I'm not alone in this.  I was just talking to a friend last night, stumbling into tap class on a Thursday night; she was totally psyched to be there, naturally, but had just been trying to read in her car beforehand and repeatedly falling asleep. 

Sure, we're old, but not THAT old.

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death: I hate you even more than cancer

I am not done.  Yep, still grieving over here.  If you tuned out for a few months and hoped I'd be done when you got back, bad news: Nope. Still heartbroken.  Still lonely. Still purposeless and adrift without the tether of my beloved four-legged best friend.  Still really and suddenly and constantly sad.  

I have spent about the last four hours soaking every available tissue with buckets of tears, just miserable over the loss of Jasper, over knowing I'll never lay eyes on his 3D self again in this plane, although I see him frequently in my dreams.  And I know it's completely idiotic to hate death, of all things. But I'm serious: I'm not going to pollyanna or sugar-coat this or say it's not my favorite.  I'm going straight for hate on this one.

Thanks to death and his bullshit, I am convinced that I'll never be truly happy in any kind of lasting way again.  Ever. 

That's crazy, right?  You can go ahead and say it.  You can go ahead and tell me I'm depressed, too, if you want to.  My only response to that is that yeah, DUH, of course, I'm depressed.  Obviously. 

But how not to be?  How depressing is it, really, that someone you love so much can exist, be doted on and touched and snuggled up and sung to for almost fourteen years, and then just vanish, just disappear?  How is that possible?  Believe me, I know intellectually how it's possible, and I can also tell myself a whole story about how he has just returned to the source, his molecules dissolving, reforming, etc., but it doesn't do anything for my heart.  My heart doesn't give a shit about any of that or about the rainbow bridge.  It just, I just want him back, I just crave a rewind of the last fourteen years of my life to any point in that timespan that had him in it, wagging, running, smiling with his entire body.

At least I never, not for one moment, took any of my time with Jasper for granted.

Used to be that it was cancer I hated with a vengeance, cancer who in one year grabbed Alex, and my sister, and Jasper briefly, then my Joe.  Cancer with its miserable darkness.  But death?  Hate it even more than cancer.

I know, I know that's silly.  I know I need to accept what is.  I need to square myself to what is.  But there's such a big part of me that sometimes just doesn't care, that doesn't see any real point.  And oh yeah, that big part that doesn't see the point?  That's my heart, the big broken part of me, the part that just can't right now do anything but grieve.

This is not a cry for help.  Don't be gross.  This is just me, keening, deep in my piles of sodden kleenex.  I get to do this, having lost someone I loved so much.  I suppose this is what happens when you love really big.  The pain of loss is equally big, expanding just like the love did, until it too vanishes, disappears beyond where the eye can see.

Miss you, miss you, miss you, Mr. Pillowsticks, sweet sweet Mr. Brown, Sharbles, Baby Cakes, every moment, every day.

Death, Tantra, animals, LOVE

One week ago right now, we were racing to UC Davis, desperate to see our Jasper, hoping against hope that we'd be able to cure him, take him home with us, have more time. It was not to be. Now a week later, I am still periodically feeling utterly nauseous with misery and missing him. I managed to get out of bed this morning without crying, but still have moments all day when I am overcome by the loss of him and my eyes leak.

It's so amazing to love someone -- yes, someone, even though he was a canine someone -- just so much.

I resisted going to Herpetology last night. In fact I spent all afternoon scheming a way to withdraw from the class. I lost my Sweet Pony, I said to myself -- what do I care about a bunch of snakes, anyway? All I wanted, I thought, was to go home, sit on the couch, stare out the window, think about Jassie, be sad if I felt sad.

But I went anyway. And that was so the right thing.

All week, glimmering just beyond my grief, has been this tantalizing thought that our lovely gorgeous Jasper was a temporary aggregation of molecules, of Shakti as we'd say in yoga, just as we all are. How lucky we were to share in that particular form that he took, so beautiful and brindle, so full of a boundless love.

I can see it more clearly now, with each passing day, though I am still aching from his absence and probably always will.

So yoga's been giving me that particular Tantric gift, of thinking that Shiva (goodness, consciousness) chose to take shape as Jasper, that the Shakti (energy) that animated him, is not gone. It's just transformed, returned to come again another way. And next year's peaches will be all the sweeter from his transformation, the roses that much more lovely.

Last night, sitting in a lecture I almost didn't attend, a lecture about crocodiles and alligators, oh I was so filled up again with the happiness of animals -- the sheer delight of looking at how they're constructed, what makes them what they are. It did so much to restore me, to draw my head back up, chin back, drink it in.

I will miss him ferociously forever. I would still trade just about anything under the sun to have Jasper back with me, but I see all the more clearly now what a tremendous gift his huge love was and that that big fat love persists, all around.

Busy-ness for my broken heart

Every day since Wednesday has started the same way, with waking up and remembering and missing Jasper.  I see his empty bed from my place in my own bed, and just feel so sad.  I stand at the window in our room and look out at the spot where we buried him and just miss him so much.  It's physical pain, this heart-ache.  It's the worst pain I have ever felt in my life.  

To people who think, "well, he was just a dog, after all. Isn't it time you got over this?", I am sending out a big Fuck Off with as much love as I can muster, out of this hole I'm in right now, grieving for my furry sweetheart who is no more.  

I can comfort myself for a little while by taking a philosophical perspective, about which I will write more later, but that comfort is short-lived.  I miss his face, the feel of his fur, his love and companionship so much, his sweetness and presence in every part of my life.

It made me cry more today to see that Joe had tipped the left-over kibbies from Jasper's bowl into the compost under the sink.   Of course I understand why Joe did it, there was no sense leaving the food in the bowl -- he was probably trying to spare me the pain of seeing it every time I walked past it in the kitchen -- but still the finality of it all is crushing. And yes, naturally there will probably come a time when we put away Jasper's things -- his collar and his various beds and dishes -- but right now I can't erase these traces of his brief passage through our shared existence.

What's crazy is how quickly we lost him.  It's a blur, really, the time between the first vet appointment on February 28th, the days between the incorrect diagnosis of pneumonia and the total failure of his poor, poor lungs.  I am dreading the day that I open the mailbox and see the new tag that I ordered for him on the day we got that pneumonia diagnosis, the day I thought, "ok, he'll be all right, we'll fix this."  It was only four days after that that we saw him for the last time, and now that damn tag is on its way here and he'll never even get to wear it.

But I will.  

As is my way, I am keeping busy through this, trying to find ways to process my grief that don't involve keening and wailing, though I have those times too.  

Broken Heart Activities:

- Compiling one big folder of all the millions of photos of Jasper we've taken over the past almost-14 years.  He was such a cute baby and such a presence through so much change in our own lives - so sweet to see all of that in one place.  

- Making a photo book of him that chronicles his life with us so that we can sit together as a family and treasure him.

- Designing the memorial to him in our yard.  We've already selected the stone that we will place over his grave (oh, i hate that word), one large enough to stretch out on, sit on, spend time companionably with him.  And now I'm thinking about what flowers to plant.

- Saying good morning and good night to him every day, stopping by to say good bye to him before leaving the house, in the same way that I always told him that I loved him whenever leaving to work or errands.

- Sitting on the bench we have pulled up near where he is buried, sometimes with Laurent or Joe, sometimes alone, and just taking in the beauty of that spot and all of the additional beauty Jasper is yielding back to it now, to become a part of the peaches and the roses and everything else.

- Reading fiction. I realized that all I had left were natural history titles and right now I don't have the brain for it.  So I took myself to the bookstore in San Anselmo yesterday and snapped up three titles, with "Slammerkin" by the immensely talented Emma Donoghue first on my queue.  It's such solace to escape.

- Watching too much "Battlestar Galactica."  We started this earlier, when we still had Jassie sleeping on the couch nearby, and now we're hooked, nearing the end of Season 2.

- Writing when possible, going to class, soaking up all the love of friends who have been so supportive and essential through this process.

This really is so painful, so much worse than I ever imagined it would be.  There is such a terrible emptiness without him here, such a loss of purpose for me: no sweet, sweet Pony to wake up for, to feed, to walk and water, to baby-talk and sing to at all moments in the day, to pet and love up and glory in every second.  I realized yesterday that I have spent so much of my life caring for someone in that way: Laurent starting in 1987, then Jasper in 1997.  It's hard to be without a baby, truly.  This is not the empty-nest I had in mind.

I know it will get better.  

He had a great life with us.  We had a great life with him.  We are learning to move on, now that his time with us in this form has ended.  And meanwhile, I'm trying to keep busy, to delight in all of the beauty that he was and still is, somewhere beyond where I can see.

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