Three Weeks of Grief

My dog died. I have a hole in my heart. If you say she was just a dog, then I say you know nothing of Love. Of its buffering. Its softness. Its knowing reflection of you in moments when you weren’t asked to be anything else. Its light cuts through the darkness of life, and my dog was such Love to me.

Grief takes over your whole body so you sense what’s real is no longer physical—that there is existence on multiple planes. You seethe with anger at matter’s hard edges, the ones that demand you see your lost Love again, but you can’t. Not yet, and not in that way.

You have to go on in the void. You have to let the emotions in and through so your own edges dissolve and you stretch to the beyond. To something bigger radiating out instead of collapsing in. That’s the only way to survive a loss like Love, grasping at the purpose of an ending. It’s to let the absence break you, scattering its seeds of change so that life, somehow, continues. It finds new soil.

Resurrection is a tender bud in the wild.