The experience of loss

 

In my function as iconoclast – one who, for example, would pull the smug Marlboro Man off his horse – and a person intent on living a singular life, I thought I’d sit down to write a poem of death. A death poem like Uncle Walt. Or Bob Frost. Or Dylan Thomas.

But I realized I could write nothing different, nothing original. Death has the same place for me as it does for others.

Only three people close to me have died, all in the recent past, each a grandparent of mine. I was very saddened for each, and I cried publicly for each, at the service and at the burial and again at the other service.

Still, it was the death of my yellow lab pup, Lucy, six cold, wet autumns ago, that moved me and pained me the most.

I have nothing unique or affecting to say about a ruffled, rather young, ruffed grouse, warm to the hand, gray phase, with a beak and closed eyes (the eyelids are buff). Or a lake trout brought up quickly from the depths and with the deep-diver’s bends, bleeding on the ice and gasping. Or a house mouse with bulging eyes, both a broken neck and crushed throat for good measure. Or the resident Canadian honker exploded by a semitruck on 61 in Colville, Minnesota. Or a doe with her backbone cleaved by 180 grains of Lead Core at a quarter-mile per second. Another doe crushed by the right front of a half-ton every day-use pick-up truck on 61 entering Hovland, Minnesota.

James Egan gives Peppy a goodbye kiss. After raising Peppy from a pup, James is sending his mischievous Golden Retriever to a home where she can have more attention from a family. “I think she will have a better chance for a good life if she is removed from me,” he says.

There is nothing insightful to say. Death is the heartsore of what was, the sorrow of what could’ve been, the sadness of whatever will be. It is many other things that I am not good enough to convey. The experience of loss, and maybe remorse, and missing, and the wretchedness of having to remain.

Peppy the golden retriever is going away tomorrow. I am re-homing her. She’s being adopted. It is a shameful thing to admit failure with a dog. It should be a shameful thing. It is a sad thing to end a relationship. But I can’t stop failing her. I think she’ll have a better chance for a good life if she is removed from me.

Right now, she is sprawled out on the beaver skin rug, between my bed and the warm wood stove, on her side, still. Breathing deeply, noisily.

She just jerked. Her legs and paws twitched. Like she’s having a nightmare. But my Peppy doesn’t have nightmares. Only I do. My Peppy has dreams.

I’ll be in hers someday if I remain behind.

Death be not smug. We are happily alive. Better off apart. One of us, the one remaining, just sitting here.