My Year of Reading Aimlessly

“I do not want to be a book worm. If its book is taken away from it, the little blind head is raised; it wags, hovers, terribly uneasy, in a void—until it begins to burrow again.”
—Katherine Mansfield

For the past year, reading has been a salve for my grief and a substitute for exploring the world beyond my apartment (doctor’s orders to stay off my feet). I’m not alone in turning to books for spiritual sustenance and guidance. Nina Sankovitch read a book a day a few years ago to comprehend her sister’s death, then turned the 365 project into a best-selling book—Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading.

Unlike Sankovitch, I’ve no best-selling book as a result of my year of reading. And I certainly didn’t match the pace and quantity of her reading. I had no deadline and no specific goal in mind.

Yet I feel changed by my bookwormishness. My grief has lightened, I’ve learned loads, I’ve discovered (or rediscovered) some critical aspects of my nature, and I feel not quite whole but substantial enough to serve the greater good in some way. Though reading didn’t heal me physically (I’m still supposed to stay off my feet), it accomplished remarkable emotional and spiritual feats.

Like Katherine Mansfield, I need to be more than a bookworm now. Venturing forward, my reading will be specifically purposeful: to strengthen and improve my physical well-being, and to advance an animal-related education project for which I’ve volunteered my time. I’ll miss making random book picks at the library, but I look forward to reading for a cause.

Correction: I (almost) ALWAYS look forward to reading. Period. Don’t you?

[Art by Ramón Casas.]

Heaven on My Mind: Never Can Say Goodbye

Heaven’s been weighing on my mind, but I’ve had a hard time envisioning it.

“Every living thing dies. There’s no stopping it.”
—the opening paragraph of Unsaid, by Neil Abramson

As I posted earlier on Lull, my reading these last few months has been full of heartbreak and partings—people from dogs, horses from people, goats from turkeys, geese from cows. There’s no end to these losses.

I grew attached to the animals I read about on blogs and in books and when they passed into the Great Beyond, my thoughts followed them. I was reluctant to let go.

I take some solace in imagining an idyllic Afterlife where once-Earth-dead creatures now frolic (or graze or float or whatever they desire) and live beyond their psychological and physical constraints.

When I finished reading The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse that Inspired a Nation, I kept thinking about the sweetness and patience Snowman had extended to everyone. He had a good life back in the day, but I wondered what his life was now. Surely his story continues.

I e-mailed a friend to share my thoughts about the book (which she had also read) and said I hoped Snowman had found his way to Just-A-Bob, our favorite character in Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven.

I e-mailed again after realizing my remarks had populated Paradise with fictional creations as well as the blood-and-bones variety. My friend, ever gracious about my many blunders, wrote back to say that of course our fictional favorites reside in the Afterlife. What’s more, fictional places are part of the landscape there (think environments devised by Tolkien and Lewis).

Fictional places? Wow! My friend had just exponentially expanded Paradise for me. I started rewinding my memories of all the books I’d read and all the films I’d seen. It made me dizzy.

“I have always imagined that paradise will be kind of a library.”
—Jorges Luis Borges

Playwright Eugene O’Neill imagines Heaven for us in “The Last Will and Testament of An Extremely Distinguished Dog,” a piece he wrote for his wife in dreaded anticipation of their beloved Dalmatian’s death. It’s written from the perspective of the dog, who describes Paradise as a place “where one is always young and full-bladdered … where each blissful hour is mealtime.”

Like Borges, O’Neill (on behalf of his dog) fashions Heaven in simple and self-serving terms that I can easily understand. It’s whatever you want most—every birthday and twinkling-star wish you ever made all rolled into one. While these are sweet notions, I suspect the truth is a bit more complex.

In his essay “Sick Dog,” environmental activist and writer Rick Bass speaks to the sorrow of loss and posits a different type of Heaven,* one that stokes my imagination and belief:

“[P]erhaps the seams, the laminae, between the various worlds—the past, present, and future, as well as the living and the nonliving—may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught, or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.

“Sometimes—not always, and I think I could even say rarely—but still, sometimes, I perceive that there is a stillness and a wholeness in the world, or in some portion or corner or fragment of the world, for some little place in time, where things just feel so right and huge and powerful and easy that I will have the perhaps blasphemous thought that maybe there are layers of heaven, and that, with our species’ dependence upon visual acuity, we might fixate too much on notions of streets-lined-with-gold as indicator or marker of when a traveler arrives in that place.

“There are definitely moments in time and places in the world where we have each felt the peace and wholeness, the stillness, spoken of in such prophecies and promises. For me it is experienced most often when I am deep in the wilderness, or up on the ridges of mountains, or in the fields and prairies with nothing but field and prairie to the horizon, or when I am simply in the presence of family. In such moments I think very much that the case could be made that we are already ankle-deep in heaven.”

Ahhh. Thank you, Mr. Bass. A picture of Paradise is coming in clearer now.


I think again about the people and animals I’ve met through my reading—their deeply felt bonds, their unfathomable grief over the deaths of their mates. It’s a comfort and a relief to view them through Rick Bass’s lens: to believe that in each relationship, long before the untimely departure of one being, the pair’s Earthly life together was already “ankle-deep in Heaven.” In the future, this is the layer I shall try to commit to memory.

* Paragraphs may not be in original order. Essay is included in the anthology WOOF! Writers on Dogs.

[Painting by Abbott Handerson Thayer and recolored for Lull.]

The Marble Truth of Easter

As joy envelops those observing Easter, the pastel colors and promise of resurrection can leave a bittersweet taste with those suffering from grief and loss. Here’s a twist on today’s holiday, a perspective that really spoke to me.

Easter

is my season
of defeat.

Though all
is green

and death
is done,

I feel alone.
As if the stone

rolled off
from the head

of the tomb
is lodged

in the doorframe
of my room,

and everyone
I’ve ever loved

lives happily
just past

my able reach.
And each time

Jesus rises
I’m reminded

of this marble
fact:

they are not
coming back.

by Jill Alexander Essbaum, from the January 2011 issue of Poetry
[Painting by Abbott H. Thayer.]

Not A Day Goes By…

It was this month last year that my husband and I took our beloved canine to the specialty wonder doctor we thought would turn her health around.

We waited at a lunch joint (called “Poochie’s”) across the street from the animal hospital while the doc conducted a battery of tests and MRIs. We returned to the vet’s office only to see the wonder doc in tears.

She revealed her diagnosis slowly, opening with news we already knew: “She’s the sweetest, most loving dog. No matter what indignities I imposed upon her, she was patient and kept giving me her paw or nosing me for a pet.” Then the doc told us what our regular vets had assured us wasn’t happening: “She’s in a great deal of pain.” The wonder doc proceeded to tell us all the options we had—none of them hopeful, all of them traumatizing.

We made what we thought was the humane choice. We sat on the hospital floor, hugging and holding our first and only dog while the doc administered a drug to calm her. After some time, the doc asked us, “Are you ready for me to give her the final drug?”

How do you answer that?

After our initial bewilderment, we nodded our heads to give the go-ahead. In seconds, she was gone. And we headed home without her—our shadow, our herder, our I’ll-make-everything-all-right-for-you-always companion.

The subtraction of her presence from our days felt surreal. As Donald Hall wrote in “Distressed Haiku”:

You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.

For years, I had counted on our pooch breaking all the longevity records and living longer than the average age for dogs of her size. But then what?

Was she ever going to reach that magic number where I would say, “Ah, yes. That’s a long-enough life. I’m ready to let her go now”? Not likely. Her passing would always be too soon.

Every day I half expect to see her again, the Heart O’ My Heart. Every day I have to remind myself that after her untimely death, she stayed dead.

Note: We have precious few photos of our pooch because cameras scared her.

Grief Brief

If you follow the reading lists posted on the far right of Lull, you may have noticed that I finished About Grief: Insights, Setbacks, Grace Notes, Taboos by Ron Marasco and Brian Shuff. I had to read it quickly because it was a short-loan from the library.

About Grief was a light read on a heavy subject. And though I didn’t learn anything new,* the book validated my recent feelings and behavior. I can think of a number of people who would benefit from reading About Grief—especially those who are experiencing an intimate loss for the first time, and those who are a little lean in the emotional intelligence department.

* One anecdote I hadn’t heard before was in a section presenting the contrasting views held of the body of the deceased and how to honor the life connected to it. Rolling Stone Keith Richards honored his father by blending some of the ashes with a leisure drug of choice and snorting the mix.

Give Me a Rake and I’ll Change the World

I raked a lot last month: vines, leaves, sticks, stones, trash, dirt. I didn’t change the world, but I certainly improved the looks of my father’s property.

“Getting down to earth” was a great tonic for my grief. Birds chattered and sang in the trees and bushes as I raked (no need for an iPod in the garden), and the sky often diverted my focus with shape-shifting clouds and colors. I watched various hues of green emerge on once-dormant trees.

Breaking down sticks and branches to fit in the designated yard bags took nearly as much of my time as raking. This task brought to mind my beloved pooch, who would have made a terrific assistant in the garden.

My one-in-a-million canine liked having work to do, and she loved sticks. But she didn’t chew on them the way other dogs do, nor did she retrieve them or prance around with them in her mouth. She “detwigged” them—pulled all the little offshoots off with her paws or her teeth until the stick was free of all excess. And once she broke it down to a straight stick, she abandoned it; mission accomplished. Had she been helping me last month, I could have finished twice as fast.

Instead, I had only the neighbors’ hound (pictured) to keep me company. He was on the other side of the fence, though, tethered in a parking area. When I asked him one day if he liked sticks, he disappeared from view for a moment, then popped up with a stick in his mouth! I took that as a Yes and started a stash of sticks for him. Every day, I’d meet him at the low end of the fence and hand over a new stick. Unlike my pooch, he was the kind of dog who preferred to find himself a sunlit spot to lie down on and slowly chew the wood. This activity prevented the boredom that so often overwhelmed him as a lonely yard dog.

As soon as he heard me in the yard, he stood near the stick stash I’d made (he couldn’t see the sticks—he just remembered me bending down in that area of the yard before giving him a new stick) and emit a single, loud bark. It wasn’t a pushy bark, either. It was more of a “Hey! Here I am! It’s me!” Who wouldn’t want to reward such sweetness—and smartness?

So I got my dog fix, my bird fix, and my gardening fix all in one task on the aptly named Woodland Avenue. Who knew that a simple rake could be the path to happiness?

Good Grief! When Does It End?

To grieve, or not to grieve.

I’m not sure we have a choice. It either happens or it doesn’t.

Trouble is, I’ve experienced so many rounds of loss in the last few years that I can no longer discern whether I’m in or out of grief mode. So I picked up one of the latest books on the subject by Ron Marasco and Brian Shuff—About Grief: Insights, Setbacks, Grace Notes, Taboos.

Years ago when I knew I was suffering from grief and needed to read about it, there was hardly a book to be found on the topic. Now it’s a genre with its own section head in bookstores and libraries. You can find books categorized according to the age of the deceased, your relationship to the deceased, the way the deceased left this world (murder, suicide, accident, illness), and the species of the deceased. You can find various approaches to understanding grief—through a lens of psychology, neurology, spirituality, or, as is the case with About Grief, through the tad flippant view of a literature/film buff.

One passage that gave me pause was this excerpt from C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed:

I once read the sentence, “I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about toothaches and lying awake.” That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

I started pondering how often I pondered my grief. I wanted to know how normal I was. I also wanted to be like C. S. Lewis. But the truth is I’m neither.

Grief and I have been together so long that I don’t have to think about it anymore—it’s permeated me. Clings to my body, oozes into my marrow, reminds me of its presence through tensions and pain and overall blueness.

Case in point: Every November, no matter what’s going right for me, I wear a whiff of melancholy. And every November, I’m perplexed by this fragrance until I remember—once again—that this was the season of great loss for my family: a grandfather and a sister within a two-week period.

My brain no longer tallies the dead; the numbers entwine with my physical well-being.

So the real choice seems to be, To grieve mindfully, or to grieve without awareness.

The right decision may be obvious, but it’s not easy.

[Thinking About Death by Frida Kahlo.]

Bystander

“I don’t reproach the spring for starting up again.

I can’t blame it for doing what it must year after year.

I know that my grief will not stop the green.”

—Wislawa Szymborska, in “Parting with a View”