My 11-year-old Dog, Ginger died on December 5th. I intended to write here. Perhaps share something about grief, a subject I’m pretty well-versed in and have been since my Mom died in 2013.
Loss and Grief. They’re funny creatures. I wanted to write. I wanted to share. But somehow, my feelings were just too private. Too big in that moment to share with anyone else. They belonged to me. The loss was my own, and it wasn’t for public consumption in that moment. It was almost like I Could Not share them. Like my arms were locked around my sad heart, and the unlocking wasn’t possible in that moment.
I’ve spent the last 27 days in a locked-up space. I haven’t felt an ounce of creativity flowing. It’s not that creativity was absent. It just seems to be…resting. Resting behind closed, locked doors.
Things haven’t been terrible. People who know how attached I was to Ginger have been checking on me. The same people know how the many losses I’ve gone through in the last 5 years have torn at me. They expected the worst. But the worst hasn’t happened. I feel like I’ve been surfing this wave pretty skillfully, and with the help of Ginger’s sister-Dog, Sofia, I’ve been settling into a life without Ginger. It’s been ok.
But I couldn’t write. I couldn’t say anything out loud. I wasn’t even able to write about grief from a clinical perspective. I mentioned this to a friend, and she suggested that perhaps I was afraid that once I started writing, the emotions would overwhelm me, but this doesn’t feel true. What feels like truth is that the loss was precious. It was special and private – meant to be experienced just with Sofia. Walked through and slept through and petted through and snuggled through.
In truth, I still don’t have much to share with you. Well, perhaps this – Grief and Loss are funny creatures. And they belong to You when you experience them. That means that you get to decide what you do with them, and you get to decide if and when to open them up for the world. Grief is sweet. Grief is heavy. Grief is one minute loud and another silent. It is your own.